am 
: pean Se 
pe oe ar te) 

Sa 


abaged 


ΣΤῊΝ 
ees ob tek 
mane Ry 


Hebhew 
eve e debbie ob 


wh tk} ft γεν δελεδεν 
ἐλελενε αν ο my τ δε ψ εν, ἐγννε μι ἡ φῆ, 
Sees Trisha ΔΕ γε ἐδ δε τὴ 


po rs 
τευ λενος ἀρ νν 
set ok 


~~ ΟΕ 
ΕΣ ΜῬΩΝ 
νΑγούίν be ἐφ ον ῦνες ὁ ἀειφέμε ς 
Perr ον γεν νον oy 
+S arene seep ἐφόδια τον vite Veteeebs: 
Dh bash 
mrt ete 
Son th meme, 


4 Ostet. gtr 
8 φλς es eet Te: 


“boheet Yep 
te sous pac 4 


Leta drtatenelet 

hemes pry st 

Coie: hy a He es 
mate 


apes gatas 


\gteOe Ole re tey 

etree 
va, 

μὲς 


ehtetee arte pope ph 
niet Rigs ἊΣ Ὁ ΠΌΣΩΝ ap" 
Ἢ ἐμὴ 


ote ¢ ΠΩ 4 


4 κε AA EON te cama τι 
ac an Ot eT one 
Lk COM N98 Oe sneha twee tegen en 
eee Te rer cceeeen tee nrerees 
HN γί “4 Mrte ogee hone sp ina mises aracenes 
κεφ Φ φεφ ὁ κι 
as 


a9 Ἐν 


We 
” Fert hes Lit ΕΠ] 
ΠΣ oh Mg terarete 
Sy abe ge patents: 


ι ’ 
." ater “46 1144 
lb ἐφ καν τὴ yee " ΟΥ̓ Ἢ ey Ὁ 
4914 ἐδ ταν εὐ εἴ (ὁ Αι 4 εὖ, τι ἀδε ἐφ ει οι tiers Ley Sash hd Eh bed 
0 ΗΝ Cert rrett γα sibel 


satin shy 


ἬΝ i ἢ ͵ ἌΝ re " ἀΦεγόφειν 
᾿ the ΠΝ ‘ ΠΗ ni tints cite! hal τ ΤῊ ΩΝ ΜΙ Pat ΠῚ te 
ἮΝ anit uit 


haat 
ita 
eines ΠΝ 


ΠΝ me 
i of et , 
ee iit 
we τὴ 


ie rao ii asst h 
‘ yet in i Hi 
Way pigs i ite Sih 


+) 
ἡ ἜΝ ᾿ 4 
ere erin ial ᾿ 4 
͵ if " ‘ Aas sy PAs ΩΝ hae mat mi ater 


Wh pag i ty 


1 
eee ities 


LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 


PRINCETON.N. J. 


PRESENTED BY 


Mrs. 8. H. Smith 
Morristown, N.J. 


- ‘aus = ἴ — pw 
Division 20 ὙΦ BY Bade Ἴδα 


2179 
Section... CQ. 6 


SS CRS συσινυσυσυσυνυ ανυνενυνυνυνυνενυνυυυ νυν... ὉὉὉὉὉὃὉὃὉ Θὁὃο28ὸᾶῳηνἪ,͵ὃ 


ΦΎΣΙΣ ΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΦΣΣΣ see: 


sarees 


Φ ΣΎ ΣΕΤ' 


ἜΣ ΕΣ σα τ 245... 


τὶ 


ΣΕΕΣΣΊΣ Στ) Σ: 


ΕΙΣ 


ay 
) 
sy 
Pe: 

Li 


ΠῚ 


STUDIES IN THE GOSPELS. 


STUDIES IN THE GOSPELS. 


BY 
FA 
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D. 


ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. 


NEW YORK: 
CHARLES SCRIBNER & COMPANY. 
1867. 


(Published by arrangement with the Author.) 


i ον 
Ἢ δ 4 ἡ Ὗ 
᾿ Ἷ 


ἐς Ridin: ΚΣ, 


τ « 


ἍΝ» 


PREFACE. 


Some Studies on the Gospels are here offered to the 
reader. 1 have never been able to consent with that 
which so often is asserted—namely, that the Gospels are 
in the main plain and easy, and that all the chief diffi- 
culties of the New Testament are to be found in the 
Epistles. There are, indeed, by the gracious provision of 
God, abundance of plain things—so plain that no way- 
farer, who seeks his waymarks, need err for lack of such, 
—alike in these and in those. But when we begin to set 
the hard things of one portion of Scripture against the 
hard things of another, I cannot admit that they have 
right who assume it as lifted above all doubt that those 
of the Epistles infinitely surpass those of the Gospels. 
How often the difficulties of the Epistles are merely diffi- 
culties of form; not of the thought, but of the setting 
forth of the thought; of the logical sequence, which only 
requires a patient disentangling, and all is comparatively 
clear. But in the Gospels it is not the form of the 
thought, for that for the most part presents little or 
nothing perplexing, but the thought itself, the divine fact 


vi PREFACE. 


or statement, which itself constitutes the difficulty. Nor, 
if I am right in affirming it to be so, is this in any way 
strange. For while there must be deep things everywhere 
in Scripture, things past man’s finding out, else it were 
no revelation, surely it is nothing surprising that the Son 
of God, who moved in all worlds as in regions familiar to 
Him, who was not the illuminated, but the Illuminator 
of all others, not inspired, but the Inspirer, should utter 
the words of widest range and mightiest reach, those 
which should most task even the enlightened spirit of 
man to understand. Believing that it 7s thus with his 
words, that they must be at once the highest and the 
deepest of all, that in his life there must be mysteries 
which find only their remote resemblances in the lives of 
any other, I have often regretted that those who in our 
time and Church have brought the choicest gifts to the 
interpretation of the New Testament, have either restricted 
themselves to the elucidation of the Epistles, as if these 
alone would offer snfficient resistance to them; or where 
their work has embraced both, have wrought out this 
latter portion of it with far more of thought and toil than 
the earlier. Surely there are hard questions enough sug- 
gested by the Sermon on the Mount, if only we would 
learn to look at it a little less superficially than now is 
our wont, questions which have never yet received an 
entirely satisfactory solution. So, too, inthe great Prophecy 
from the Mount there are knots, which, to my mind at 
least, have never been perfectly untied. Neither is the 
solemn judgment scene with which the twenty-fifth chapter 


PREFACE. vil 


of St. Matthew closes altogether so easy as it seems. The 
limpid clearness of St. John’s style conceals from us often 
the profundity of the thought, as the perfect clearness of 
waters may altogether deceive us about their depth; and 
we may thus be too lightly tempted to conclude that 
while St. Paul may be hard, St. John at all events is easy. 
I believe this to be very far from the case. 

These Studies, written for the most part some years 
ago, are the fruit of this conviction; not that in them I 
have gone out of my way to seek the hard passages in 
the Gospels, although I have not shunned such. They 
are the fragments of a much larger scheme, in which I 
had not advanced far before I saw plainly that I could 
never hope to complete it; and which I thereupon laid 
aside. Gathering up lately a portion of what I had 
written, for publication, I have given it as careful a 
revision as my leisure would allow, have indeed in 
many parts rewritten it, seeking to profit by the results 
of the latest criticism, as far as I have been able to 
acquaint myself with them. For my labours I shall be 
abundantly repaid, if now, when so many controversies 
are drawing away the Christian student from the rich 
and quiet pastures of Scripture to other fields, not per- 
haps barren, but which can yield no such nourishment 
as these do, I shall have contributed aught to detain 


any among them. 


PaLaAck, DUBLIN: 
March 8, 1867. 


ven Oh ὶ ee 
Ἢ aes. 


ive, ve) sal rn’ 


ν᾿ Ms 2 mt 


Io. 


11. 


12. 


13. 


14. 


15. 


16. 


CONTENTS. 


THE TEMPTATION . 

THE CALLING OF PHILIP AND NATHANAEL . 
CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN 

THE SONS OF THUNDER : . . 
WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN 

THE THRHE ASPIRANTS . 


THE NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, AND THE 
NEW WINE IN THE OLD VESSELS 


THE TRANSFIGURATION . 


JAMES AND JOHN OFFERING TO CALL FIRE FROM 
HEAVEN ON THE SAMARITAN VILLAGE 


THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY 


THE PHARISEES SEEKING TO SCARE THE LORD FROM 
GALILEE . 


THE UNFINISHED TOWER AND THE DEPRECATED WAR 
ZACCHAUS . 

THE TRUE VINE 

THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR 


CHRIST AND THE TWO DISCIPLES ON THE way TO 
EMMAUS . 


147 


"168 


184 


215 


313 


STUDIES IN THE GOSPELS. 


1. THE TEMPTATION. 
Matt. iv. r—11; Mark i. 12, 13; Luke iv. 1—13. 


Or the Temptation of our Lord we possess three records : 
two more full, in the first and third Gospels, one more 
summary, in the second. St. John has no report of it, 
and indeed no allusion to it, except indeed we are to find 
one in the words of Christ, ‘The prince of this world 
cometh, and hath nothing in Me’ (xiv. 30); though, of 
course, even then the reference could not be exclusively 
to it; but only to it as the supreme moment in which 
‘the prince of this world’ wrought his worst, that so he 
might have ‘something’ in Him, as through sin he has 
something in every other child of Adam. Origen (on 
Matt. xxvii. 32) calls attention to the fact that, with all the 
significance which the Temptation possesses, occupying 
as it does a place in the foreground of two Gospels and, 
although more briefly, of a third, no place has been found 
for it, any more than for the Transfiguration, in the 
fourth. He suggests as a reason for this omission that 
it did not belong to the theology, using this term in its 


strictest sense; not, thatis, to the divine, but rather to the 
B 


2 THE TEMPTATION. 


human, aspect of Christ’s person and work; He being 
tempted not as He was God, who cannot be tempted 
with evil (Jam. i. 13), but as He was man. It cohered 
therefore intimately with the predominant purpose and 
aim of the three earlier Gospels that the Temptation 
should find a place in them, with the intention of the 
fourth that it should be absent there. 

Assuredly Origen is right in starting with the assump- 
tion that some explanation is to be looked for; that there 
is nothing of haphazard in the admissions and exclusions 
of the several Evangelists ; that a prevailing idea in each 
Gospel accounts for what it has, and whatit has not; and 
why it has, or has not, this or the other incident or 
discourse. Indeed I am persuaded that, notwithstanding 
all which has been already accomplished, devout students 
of Scripture may for a long time to come find an ample, 
almost inexhaustible, field of study in the tracing out 
in each the operation of this ever active law of exclusion 
and inclusion. At the same time we need not look so far 
as he has looked for an explanation of the important fact 
which he has thus noted; and which, indeed, almost all 
must have observed. The record of the Temptation in 
the previous Gospels does not to me make strange the 
omission of it in St. John’s, but rather accounts for it; 
seeing that his Gospel was certainly, intended to be 
supplementary to those which went before; not to go 
over ground which they had sufficiently gone over 
already ; but to treasure up precious aspects of the life 
of Christ, of his words and works, which they had passed 
by. Such was the spiritual opulence of that life that 
only so, only through a‘ four-sided Gospel, as Origen him- 
self has called it, could that life be adequately presented 


THE TEMPTATION. 3 


to the Church. This supplementary character of St. 
John’s Gospel, when once admitted, at once explains why 
he did not relate what those who went before him had 
so fully related. 


This history of our Lord’s Temptation in the wilder- 
ness ought never to be contemplated apart from that of 
his Baptism. It is certain, at least, that we shall miss 
much of its significance, if we dissociate it even in thought 
from the solemn recognition of the Son by the Father, 
and salutation of Him from heaven, with which the 
Evangelical History in all its three narratives has knit 
it so closely (Matt. iti. 16, 17; Mark i. 9-11; Luke iii. 
21, 22). The Church of old did not shrink from calling 
her Lord’s Baptism his second nativity.t It is true, 
indeed, that when some of the early sects made it his 
first divine nativity (and Ebionites and Gnostics,’ op- 
posed in so much else, had a common interest in this), 
she then fell back upon the mightier fact, the Incarnation, 
in the assertion of which alone she felt herself to possess 
a Son of God in any but a deceptive and merely illusory 
sense. The Baptism may thus have fallen somewhat out 
of sight, and not come to its full honours, or to all the 
prominence which, except for these disturbing causes, it 
would have obtained. 

It is not however here my part to consider the Baptism 
more than under a single aspect, namely, in its con-, 

1 See a sermon to this effect which used to be ascribed to Augustine, 
but which the Benedictine Editors have rightly adjudged to the Appendix 
(Serm. 135), in which this is strongly set forth, pushed almost to a perilous 
©. The followers of Basilides, as Olemens of Alexandria tells us (Strom. 
i. 21), kept a feast of the Baptism, which they ushered in with a night, 


spent in the reading of the Scriptures. 
B2 


4 THE TEMPTATION. 


nection with the Temptation. The Son in that Baptism 
had received his heavenly armour, and now He goes 
forth to prove it, and try of what temper it is. Having 
been baptized with water and the Holy Ghost, He shall 
now be baptized with the fire of temptation; even as 
there is another baptism, the baptism of blood (Matt. 
Xx. 22), in store for Him: for the gifts of God are not 
for the Captain of our salvation any more than for his 
followers the pledge of exemption from a conflict, but 
rather powers with which He is furnished, and, as it 
were, inaugurated thereunto ;' and thus that word with 
which the Temptation is introduced, ‘Then was Jesus led 
into the wilderness, ἃ word which links this event so 
closely with the Baptism, is much more than a mere 
‘then, designating succession of time; for indeed it 
denotes rather the divine order in which the events of 
the Saviour’s life followed one another, and is intended 
to call our attention to this. 

And as with the Baptism, so also with the Temptation. 
We cannot estimate too highly the importance of the 
victory which was then gained by the second Adam, or 
the bearing which it had, and still has, on the work of 
our redemption. Milton showed that he had a true feeling 
of this, when he wrote a poem which contained nothing 
more than a history of this victoriously surmounted 
temptation, and called it Paradise Regained; setting it, 
as the story of the second Adam’s victory, over against 
Paradise Lost, or the story of the first Adam’s defeat. It 
is not too much to say, as Augustine said often, that the 
entire history, moral and spiritual, of the world revolves 


‘ As Chrysostom (Hom, 13 in Matt.) well says here: καὶ γὰρ διὰ τοῦτο 
ἔλαβες ὅπλα, οὐχ iva ἀργῇς, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα πολεμῆῇς. 


THE TEMPTATION. 5 


around two persons, Adam and Christ... To Adam was 
given a position to maintain; he did not maintain it, and 
the lot of the world for ages was decided. And now with 
the second Adam the second trial of our race has arrived. 
All is again at issue. Again we are represented by a 
Champion, by One who is in the place of ad/,—whose 
standing shall be the standing of many, and whose fall, 
if that fall had been conceivable, would have been the 
fall of many, yea of all. Once already Satan had thought 
to nip the kingdom of heaven in the bud, and had nearly 
succeeded. If it had not been for a new and unlooked-for 
interposition of God, for the promise of the Seed of the 
woman, he would have done it. He will now prove if 
he cannot more effectually crush it, and for ever. Then, 
on that first occasion, there was still a reserve, the pattern 
according to whom Adam was formed; who should come 
forth in due time to make what Adam had marred ;—but 
He failing, there was none behind; the last stake would 
have been played,—and lost. 


‘Then was Jesus led of the Spirit into the wilderness.’ 
If it be asked, of what Spirit He was thus led, un- 
doubtedly of the Spirit of God—in the words of Jeremy 
Taylor, ‘ He was led by the good Spirit to be tempted of 
the evil. Some few have understood it otherwise, and . 
that it was the same evil Spirit who afterwards en- 
countered Him in the wilderness, who first led Him 
thither.?. But this is certainly a mistake. We havé here 


1 Op. Imp. Con. Jul. ii. 163: Unde fit ut totum genus humanum quodam- 
modo sint homines duo, primus et secundus. Serm. 90: Venit unus contra 
unum; contra unum qui sparsit unus qui collegit . . . . Homo et homo; 
homo ad mortem, et homo ad vitam. 

? See Spanheim, Dub. Loan., L. They have often found an argument in 


6 THE TEMPTATION. 


one, and of course the most signal and transcendant, 
of those stirrings from the Spirit of God to some heroic 
achievement whereof we have many anticipations in lower 
forms of the spiritual life in the Old Testament, as in 
Moses (Acts vii. 23), in Gideon (Judg. vi. 34), in Samson 
(Judg. xili. 25; xiv. 19). The Captain of our salvation 
went into the wilderness, drawn by another, but at the 
same time freely ; in the words of one of the Schoolmen, 
as an athlete going of his own accord,! or, to cite Jeremy 
Taylor once more, ‘not by an unnatural violence, but by 
the efficacies of inspiration, and a supernatural inclination 
and activity of resolution.’ 

The scene of the Temptation was the ‘ wilderness.’ 
What wilderness we are not told;? and all which it 
imports us to note is that it was a wilderness, in which 
this encounter of the good and the evil, each in its highest 
representative, found place. There could have been no 
fitter scene, nor so fit. The waste and desert places of the 
earth are, so to speak, the characters which sin has visibly 
impressed on the outward creation; its signs and its 
the αὐτὸν ἐκβάλλει of Mark i. 12, as though no such violent driving or 
thrusting forth as this word implies could have been ascribed to the Holy 
Spirit. There is no force in the argument. ᾿Ἐκβάλλειν in Hellenistic use 
continually signifies not a violent thrusting out, but an orderly putting 
forth. Thus, ‘ Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that He will send 
orth (iva ἐκβάλῃ) labourers into his harvest’ (Matt. ix. 38); the householder 
bringeth forth (ἐκβάλλει) out of his treasure new and old (Matt. xiii. 52; 
cf. John x. 4; Jam. ii. 25); and with this milder use of the word agree the 
ἀνήχθη and the ἤγετο by which St. Matthew and St. Luke severally de- 
scribe the bringing of the Lord upon the scene of his temptation. 

' Quasi athleta sponte procedens (Aquinas). 

* Tradition places the scene of the Temptation in ‘the wilderness that 
goeth up from Jericho’ (Josh. xvi. 1; ef. Josephus, Antt. x. 8. 2), which ex- 
tended a great part of the way to Jerusalem (Josh. xviii. 12), and fixes it 
more immediately on a steep and rugged mountain rising like a wall of rock 


from the plain, and subsequently called Quarantana, from the quarantain, or 
forty days of fasting, which the Lord had there observed. 


THE TEMPTATION. 7 


symbols there; the echoes in the outward world of the 
desolation and wasteness which sin has wrought in the 
inner life of men. Out of a true feeling of this men have 
ever conceived of the wilderness as the haunt of evil 
spirits. In the old Persian religion Ahriman and his evil 
spirits inhabit the steppes and wastes of Turan, to the 
north of the happy Ivan, which stands under the dominion 
of Ormuzd; exactly as with the Egyptians, the evil Typhon 
is the lord of the Libyan sand-wastes, and Osiris of the 
fertile Egypt.’ This sense of the wilderness as the haunt 
of evil spirits, one which the Scripture more or less allows 
(Matt. xii. 43; Isai. xiii. 21, xxxiv. 14; Rev. xviii. 2), 
would of itself give a certain fitness to that as the place 
of the Lord’s encounter with Satan; but only in its 
antagonism to Paradise or the Garden, do we see yet 
higher fitness in the appointment of the place. The 
garden and the desert are the two most opposite poles of 
natural life; in them we have the highest harmonies and 
the deepest discords of nature. It was just that the first 
Adam, so long as he stood*in his original uprightness, 
should be a dweller in the Garden; that his outward 
surroundings should correspond to his inner life, that 
there should be no disagreement between them; and it 
was there, in the garden df Eden, that Ais temptation went 
forward. Being worsted in the conflict, he was expelled 
therefrom ; and he and that race whose destinies were 
linked with his, should henceforth inhabit an earth which 
was cursed for his sake.” It is true, indeed, that in this as 


* Creuzer, Symbolik, vol. i. p. 223. 

* Ambrose (Hap. in Luc. iv. 7): Convenit recordari quemadmodum de 
paradiso in desertum Adam primus ejectus sit; ut advertas quemadmodum 
de deserto ad paradisum Adam secundus reverterit . . . . In deserto Adam, 
in deserto Christus ; sciebat enim ubi posset invenire damnatum, quem ad 
paradisum, resoluto errore, revocaret. 


8 THE TEMPTATION. 


in so much else the curse was in part mercifully lightened, 
and the earth was not all desert; yet for all this its desert 
places do evermore represent to us what the whole of it 
might justly have been; the curse concentrates itself upon 
them. The second Adam therefore, taking up the conflict 
exactly where the first had left it, and imheriting all the 
consequences of his defeat, in the desert does battle with 
the foe; and conquering him there, wins back the garden 
for that whole race, whose champion and representative 
in this conflict He had been. And this is not the less 
true, however as yet that garden blooms not again; or 
blooms only in part; for in the higher culture and more 
complete subduing to the needs and delights of men, of 
those regions where the faith of Christ is owned, we may 
see already pledges and promises of that complete restora- 
tion of the earth to all its original fertility and beauty, 
which Christ’s victory over Satan in the wilderness shall 
one day have brought about. 

While we are upon this point, it is worthy of note that 
St. Mark, briefly as he records the Temptation (and two 
verses are all that he affords to it, i. 12, 13), yet gives us 
an intimation which we should look for in vain in the 
fuller accounts of the other Evangelists, and one which 
we should not slightly or carelessly pass over. His 
record of this event, in its summary brevity as compared 
with theirs, is very like his record of the Lord’s appearance 
to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus (xvi. 12, 13) 
as compared with that of St. Luke (xxiv. 13-34). Not 
indeed that this is always his manner; for brief as his 
Gospel is on the whole, he can relate events with far greater 
breadth than either St. Matthew or St. Luke; as witness 
his account of the healing of the Gadarene demoniac 


THE TEMPTATION. 9 


(v. 1-20), and of the lunatic boy (ix. 14-29), compared 
with theirs. On the present occasion he tells us of the 
Lord that, being in the wilderness, ‘ He was with the wild 
beasts’ (ver. 13). Now this notice is certainly not intro- 
duced, as many interpreters would have us to believe, 
merely to enhance the waste desolation and savage solitude 
of that scene, but at once throws us back, as it was 
intended to throw us back, on the Paradisiacal state which 
in the second Adam had bloomed anew. ‘ He was with 
the wild beasts’—which owned Him for their rightful 
Lord; He was with them, as Adam had been before he 
sinned. In Him, the second Adam, the ideal man of the 
eighth Psalm, the Adamic prerogatives, lost and suspended 
so long, after the Deluge only partially recovered (Gen. 
ix. 2) fully reappeared (cf. Gen. i. 26, 28 with Ps. viii.).? 
The Apocryphal Gospels, whose marvellous is in general 
merely the monstrous, and which so seldom pourtray the 
divine Child with any traits which are really divine, are 
not here so remote at once from ideal and from historic 
truth, as is commonly their case. One of these tells of the 
Child Jesus that in his flight to Egypt the lions and the 
leopards played harmlessly about Him, and accompanied 
Him upon his way.’ 

This resumption of dominion by the second Adam over 
the revolted animal world should be more or less continued 
in his saints. They too should ‘take up serpents’ (Mark 
xvi. 18); should tread on serpents and scorpions (Luke x. 
19), so reversing the threat of Jeremiah viii. 17; Paul 


* Giles Fletcher, in his too much neglected poem, Christ’s Triumph on 
Earth (ver. 1-40), has seized the meaning of these words better than any 
that I know. 

* Thilo, Codex Apocryphus, p. 394. 


10 THE TEMPTATION. 


should shake the venomous beast from his hand and feel no 
harm (Acts xxviii. 5; cf. Job v. 22,23; Ezek. xxxiv.25; 
Hos. ii. 18). Anda true sense of this, as an ultimate prero- 
gative destined for redeemed man, appears, though often in 
extreme caricature, in the innumerable legends of saints, 
to whose word and will the wildest creatures are obedient, 
who summon the fishes to their preaching, who cross 
rivers on the backs of crocodiles, and accomplish a thou- 
sand other feats of a like kind. Nor can we say that this 
dominion has wholly departed even from man in his natu- 
ral estate; the fragments of his sceptre still remain in his 
hands ; ‘Every kind of beasts is tamed, and hath been 
tamed, of mankind’ (Jam. iil. 7; cf. Sophocles, Antigone, 
343-351, a lyrical echo from heathendom of the same 
truth); but this sceptre which he only wields with diffi- 
culty, and with frequent uprisings of his rebellious 
vassals against him, Christ, as was manifest during these 
forty days, wielded with an absolute authority. So much 
we may read in those words, ‘He was with the wild 
beasts.’ 

To that wilderness He, ‘the glorious Eremite’ was led, 
‘to be tempted of the devil. Very remarkable is the 
prominence which Satan assumes in the New Testa- 
ment, compared with the manner in which he and the 
whole doctrine concerning him are kept in the background 
in the Old. There, after the first appearance of the 
adversary in Paradise, which even itself is a veiled ap- 
pearance, he is withdrawn for a long while altogether 
from the scene; nay, there is but a glimpse of him, a 
passing indication here and there of such a spiritual head 
of the kingdom of evil, through the whole earlier economy 
—as in the first and second chapters of Job, Zech. iii. 1, 2, 


THE TEMPTATION. : 11 


and 1 Chron. xxi.1; he is only referred to twice in the 
Apocrypha (Wisd. ii. 24; Ecclus. xxi. 27). This may 
partly be explained by an analogy drawn from things 
natural, namely that where the lights are brightest, the 
shadows also are darkest. Height and depth are correla- 
tives of one another. It is right which first reveals 
wrong; and hate only can be read as hate in the light of 
love; and unholiness in the light of purity. But this does 
not explain the reticence of Scripture altogether. No 
doubt in that childhood of the human race men were 
not yet ripe for this knowledge. For as many as took it 
in earnest, and as it deserves to be taken, for them it 
would have been too dreadful thus to know of a prince 
of the powers of darkness, until they had known first of a 
Prince of Light. Those, therefore, whom God is educa- 
ting are not allowed to understand anything very distinctly 
of Satan, till with the spiritual eye it is given to them to 
behold him as lightning fall from heaven; then indeed, 
but not till then, the Scripture speaks of him plainly and 
without reserve. We may perhaps take a hint from this 
in the teaching of children. The order which was 
observed of God in the teaching of our race, the reticence, 
almost entire, but not perfectly so, which was observed in 
the childhood of our race, may be profitably observed 
also with children; as also with those whose faculties are 
as yet spiritually undeveloped. ‘I write unto you little 
children,’ says the apostle St. John, ‘because ye have 
known the Father’ (1 John ii. 13); this was what they 
had learned from him, even a heavenly Father's love ; but 
he proceeds: ‘I have written unto you, young men, be- 
cause ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, 
and ye have overcome the wicked one’ (ver. 14). To them, 


12 THE TEMPTATION. 


to the strong, it was given to know that they wrestled not 
against flesh and blood, but against spiritual wickedness 
in heavenly places (Ephes. vi. 12). 


‘And when He had fasted forty days He was afterward 
an hungred. Wow are we intended to understand a fast of 
this length, manifestly impossible to man under ordinary 
conditions? Not by bringing in, as some have done, 
Christ’s divine power as the explanation of all; which 
would indeed rob this fact of its significance for us. We 
must seek the explanation elsewhere. We are far too 
much accustomed, in a stiff dualism, to conceive of the 
spiritual and material as of two worlds altogether apart, 
with a rigid line of demarcation between them, so that 
the powers and influences of the higher cannot pass over 
effectually to operate in the sphere of the lower. Yet all 
the experience of our daily life contradicts this, and we 
note the higher continually making itself felt in the region 
of the lower. The wayworn regiment, which could 
scarcely drag itself along, but which revives at the well- 
known air, and forgets all its weariness, what does it 
but declare that the spirit is lord not merely in its own 
domain, but is meant to be, and even now in no incon- 
siderable degree is, the lord of the provinces of man’s 
life that lie beneathit? Matter, instead of offering a stub- 
born resistance to spirit, proves in many and marvellous 
ways to be plastic to it. Sensuality debases and degrades 
the countenance; purity and love ennoble it, casting a 
beam even upon the outward shape. What is the resur- 
rection of the body, or the ultimate glorification of nature, 
or the larger number of those miracles wrought by the 
Lord in the days of his flesh, but the workings of spirit 


THE TEMPTATION. 13 


upon matter? So too it fared with his forty days’ fast. 
To bring in here his divine power, or to suppose that He 
then fasted otherwise than as a man, is, as has been urged 
already, to rob the whole transaction of its meaning. 
Upborne and upholden above the common needs of the 
animal life by the great tides of spiritual gladness, in the 
strength of that recent Baptism, in the solemn joy of that 
salutation and recognition from his Father, He found and 
felt no need for all these forty days. As a slighter 
incident of the same kind He forgets hunger and thirst, or 
rather feels them no more, by the well of Samaria, in the 
joy of winning a lost soul (John iv. 31-34). In the lives 
of other men there are quite enough of analogies, which, 
however removed from this, do yet witness in their lower 
measure for this same predominance of the spirit, for the 
dominion which it is able to exercise over the workings of 
the natural life. All intenser passions, a mighty joy, an 
overwhelming sorrow, an ecstatic devotion, all these have 
continually been found to bring a temporary release with 
them from the necessities of the animal life, and though 
not for so long a time, still to suspend its claims for a 
season. Thus Paul at the crisis of his conversion was three 
days without eating or drinking (Acts ix. 9). 

For forty days this fast of the Lord’s endured. But 
wherefore for exactly this number, for forty, and neither 
more nor less? We are the more tempted to ask this 
question from the frequent recurrence of this same number 
under circumstances notaltogether dissimilar. Of precisely 
this same length were the fasts of Moses (Deut. ix. g) and 
Elijah (1 Kin. xix. 8); He the Head of the New Covenant 
in nothing coming short of those who stood as the Chiefs 
and Representatives of the Old, of the Law, and of the 


14 THE TEMPTATION. 


Prophets (Matt. xvii. 3). And yet his fast of forty days 
is not determined by theirs; but rather theirs and his 
are alike determined by the significance which this 
number, forty, in Holy Scripture everywhere obtains. 
Ona close examination we note it to be everywhere there 
the number or signature of penalty, of affliction, of the 
confession, or the punishment, of sin.’ Thus it is the 
signature of the punishment of sin in the forty days and 
forty nights during which God announces that He will’ 
cause the waters of the deluge to prevail (Gen. vii. 4, 12) ;” 
in the forty years of ‘the Israelites’ wanderings in the 
desert) (Num. Xiv.-33; xxxii. 13, 14; Ps? xev. ΤΠ 
the forty stripes with which the offender should be beaten 
(Deut. xxv. 3; 2 Cor. xi. 24); in the desolation of Egypt 
which should endure forty years (Ezek. xxix. 11). So 
also is it the signature of the confession of sin; Moses 
intercedes forty days for his people (Deut. ix. 25); the 
Ninevites proclaim a fast of forty days (Jon. iil. 4); 
Ezekiel must bear for forty days the transgression of 


* Jerome (Jn Amos. ii. 10): Ipse Dominus fecit nos exire de seculo, et 
per annos quadraginta, qui numerus semper afflictionis et jejunii, luctfis est 
et doloris, per tribulationes et angustias pervenire in terram sanctam. And 
again (Jn Jon. iii. 4): Porro quadragenarius numerus convenit peccatoribus, 
et jejunio et orationi, et sacco et lacrimis et perseverantizw deprecandi: ob 
quod et Moyses quadraginta diebus jejunavit in monte Sina; et Elias fugiens 
Jezebel, indicta fame terre Israél, et Dei desuper ira pendente, quadraginta 
dies jejundsse describitur. Ipse quoque Dominus, verus Jona missus ad pre- 
dicationem mundi, jejunavit quadraginta dies. Cf. Zn Hzek. xxix.11. Thus 
too Origen (Jn Deut. xxv. 3): Semper observavimus numerum .quadraginta 
malisobnoxinm esse. Unde Moses quadraginta diebus jejunavit, et post eum 
Elias. Quin et Salvator noster a diabolo tentatus non manducavit quadra- 
ginta diebus et quadraginta noctibus ; et magnum diluvium in terra contigit, 
cum Deus imbrem fecisset quadraginta diebus et quadraginta noctibus. 
Compare Augustine, Quest. in Gen. qu. 169; Serm. 125,§9; De Cons. 
Evang. ii. δὲ 8, 9. In both these latter places he attempts, not very suc- 
cessfully as it seems to me, to give the rationale of forty as this number of 
penitence. 

3. Ambrose, De Noé et Arcd, xiii. § 44. 


THE TEMPTATION. 15 


Judah (Ezek. iv. 6); forty days, or twice forty in the 
case of a maid child, are the period of a woman’s purify- 
ing after child-birth (Lev. xii. 2-5; cf. Ps. li. 5: ‘in 
sin hath my mother conceived me’). And in agreement 
with all this, resting on the forty days’ fast of her Lord, 
is the Quadragesimal Lent fast of the Church; with the 
selection of this Scripture of the Temptation to supply 
the Gospel for the first Sunday in that season, as being 
the Scripture which, duly laid to heart, will more than 
any other help us rightly to observe that time.’ 

On one of these forties Tertullian dwells with peculiar 
emphasis ; often bringing out the relation between the 
forty days of our Lord’s Temptation and the forty years 
of Israel’s trial in the wilderness. His fast as the true 
Israel, as the fulfiller of all which Israel after the flesh 
had left unfulfilled, the victor in all where it had been the 
vanquished, was as much a witness against thew carnal 
appetites (for it was in the indulgence of these that they 
sinned continually, Exod. xv. 23, 24 xvi. 2, 3; Xvi. 2, 3; 
Num. xi. 4, 33)? as a witness against Adam’s.* It was 
by this abstinence of his declared that man was ordained 
to be, and that the true man would be, lord over his 
lower nature. In this way Christ’s forty days’ fast is the 


* Augustine, Serm. 210. 

* De Bapt.20: Dominus quantum existimo, de figuré Israélis exprobra- 
tionem in ipsum retorsit. Namque populus mare transgressus, in solitudine 
translatus per quadraginta annos, illic cum divinis copiis aleretur, nihilo- 
minus ventris et gula meminerat, quam Dei. Deinde Dominus post aquam 
segregatus in deserto, quadraginta dierum jejunia cmensus, ostendit non pane 
vivere hominem Dei, sed Dei verbo; tentationesque plenitudini et immoderan- 
tive ventris adpositas, abstinentia elidi. 

* De Jejun. 6: Immo noyum hominem in veteris sugillationem virtute 
fastidiendi cibum initiabat, ut eum, diabolo rursus per escam tentare quierenti, 
fortiorem fame tot ostentaret; and again, c. 5: Nam et primus populus 
primi hominis resculpserat crimen. 


16 THE TEMPTATION. 


great counter-fact in the work of redemption, at once to 
Adam’s and to Israel's compliances with the suggestions 
of the fleshly appetite ; exactly in the same manner as the 
unity of tongues at Pentecost is the counter-fact to the 
confusion of tongues at Babel (Gen. xi. 7, 8; Acts ii. 6-11), 
to which the Church would draw our attention in the 
selection of the latter as one of our Whitsuntide lessons. 

For forty days that arrest of the sense of bodily need 
had continued ; but at the expiration of these the need, 
suspended so long, made itself felt in its strength; ‘He 
was afterward an hungred. The Tempter sees, and 
thinks to use his opportunity ; and the Temptation proper, 
dividing itself into three successive acts, begins. But 
before we enter upon these, a few words may fitly find 
place on more than one subject of the deepest practical 
interest. 

And first, the assertion of the existence of a Tempter 
at all, of a personal Wicked One, of the devil, this, as is 
well known, is a stumblingblock to many. Not urging 
here the extent to which the veracity of Christ Himself is 
pledged to the fact, I will content myself with observing 
that it is not by Scriptural arguments alone that it is sup- 
ported. ‘There is a dark mysterious element in man’s life 
and history, which nothing else can explain. We can 
only too easily understand the too strong attractions of 
the objects of sense on a being who is sensuous as well as 
spiritual ; the allowing of that lower nature, which should 
have been the ruled, to reverse the true relation, and to 
become the ruler. We can understand only too easily 
man’s yielding, even his losing, of himself in this region of 
sense. But there is a mystery far more terrible than this, 
a phenomenon unintelligible except upon one assumption. 


“ 


ἧς 


THE TEMPTATION. 17 


Those to whom the doctrine of an Evil Spirit is peculiarly 
unwelcome have been at infinite pains to exorcise theology ; 
and from that domain at least to cast Satan out, even 
though they should be impotent to cast him out from any 
other. All who shrink from looking down into the 
abysmal depths of man’s fall, because they have no eye 
for the heavenly heights of his restoration, seem to count 
that much will have been gained thereby; although it 
may be very pertinently asked, as indeed one has asked, 
What is the profit of getting rid of the devil, so long as 
the devilish remains? of explaining away an Evil One, so 
long as the evil ones who remain are so many?’ What 
profit indeed? Assuredly this doctrine of an Evil Spirit, 
tempting, seducing, deceiving, prompting to rebellion and 
revolt, so far from casting a deeper gloom on the destinies 
of humanity, is full of consolation, and lights up with a 
gleam and glimpse of hope spots which seem utterly dark 
without it. One might well despair of oneself, having 
no choice but to believe that all the strange suggestions of 
evil which have risen up before one’s own heart had been 
born there; one might’well despair of one’s kind, having 
no choice but to believe that all its hideous sins and all 
its monstrous crimes had been self-conceived and bred 
within its own bosom. But there is hope, if ‘an enemy 
have done this ;’ if, however the soil zz which these wicked 
thoughts and wicked works have sprung up has been the 
heart of man, yet the seed from which they sprung had 
been there sown by the hand of another. 

And who will venture to deny the existence of this 


* Goethe, in the spirit of finest irony, puts these words into the mouth of 
Mephistopheles: 
‘ Den Bosen sind sie los, die bésen sind geblieben.’ 
C 


18 THE TEMPTATION. 


devilish, as distinguished from the animal, in man? 
None certainly, who knows aught of the dread possi- 
bilities of sin lurking in his own bosom, who has studied 
with any true insight the moral history of the world. In 
what way else explain that men not merely depart from 
God, but that they defy Him; that, instead of the un- 
godly merely forgetting God and letting Him go, His 
name is as often or oftener on their lips than on those of 
them that love and serve Him? How else explain the 
casting of fierce words against Him, the actual and active 
hatred of God which it is impossible not to recognize in 
some wicked men? What else will account for delight 
in the contemplation or in the infliction of pain, for strange 
inventions of wickedness, above all, of cruelty and lust— 
‘lust hard by hate’? What else for evil chosen for its 
own sake, and for that fierce joy which men so often 
find in the violation of law, this violation being itself 
the attraction; with all those other wicked joys, ‘ mala 
gaudia mentis,’ as the poet in a single phrase has charac- 
terized them so well? 

The mystery is as inexplicable as it is dreadful so long 
as man will know nothing of a spiritual world beneath 
him, as well as one above him; but it is only too easy 
to understand, so soon as we recognize man’s evil as not 
altogether his own, but detect behind his transgression an 
earlier transgression and an earlier transgressor—one who 
fell, not as man fell, for man’s fall was mercifully broken 
by that very flesh which invited it; but who fell as only 
Spirits can fall, from the height of heaven to the depth of 
hell; fell never to rise again; for he was not deceived, 
was not tempted, as was Adam; but himself chose the 
evil with the clearest intuition that it was the evil, for- 


THE TEMPTATION. 19 


sook the good with the clearest intuition that it was the 
good; whose sin therefore in its essence was the sin 
against the Holy Ghost, and as such, not to be forgiven 
in this world nor in the world to come. All is explicable 
when we recognize the existence of such a Spirit; who, 
being lost without hope of redemption himself, seeks to 
work the same loss in other of God’s creatures, and 
counts it a small triumph to have made man bestial, 
unless he can make him devilish as well. Such a per- 
sonal Tempter innumerable moral and spiritual phenomena 
of this fallen world at once demand and attest; and 
such a Tempter or devil existing, it lay in the necessity 
of things that he should come into direct and immediate 
collision with Him who had one mission in the world, 
and that, to destroy the works of the devil. 

But freely admitting the existence of such a Tempter, 
the Temptation of Christ, that He should have been 
tempted at all, or having been tempted, that such im- 
measurable worth should be attached to his victory 
over temptation, this has a difficulty of its own, which 
has more or less clearly presented itself to many, I sup- 
pose to every one who has sought at all to enter into the 
deeper significance of this mysterious transaction. The 
difficulty and dilemma may be stated thus: Hither there 
was that in Christ which more or less responded to the 
temptation—how then was He without sin, seeing that 
sin moves in the region of desires quite as really as in 
that of external acts? or there was nothing in Him that 
responded to the suggestions of the Tempter—where then 
was the reality of the temptation, or what was the signi- 
ficance of the victory which in the wilderness He won ? 


The secret of the difficulty which these alternatives 
02 


20 THE TEMPTATION. 


present to our minds, so that sometimes it appears to us 
impossible that Christ’s Temptation should have been real, 
leaving Him as it did wholly unscathed, lies in the mourn- 
ful experience which we in our own spiritual life have 
made, namely, that almost all of our temptations involve 
more or less of sin, that the serpent leaves something 
of his trail even there where he is not allowed to nestle 
and make his home. Conquerors though we may be, 
yet we seldom issue from the conflict without a scratch,— 
a hurt it may be which soon heals, but which has left its 
cicatrice behind it. Very seldom indeed we come forth 
from these fires, as the Three Children, without even so 
much as the smell of fire having passed upon us (Dan. 
iii. 27). The saint, if he shine asa diamond at last, yet it 
is still as a diamond which has been polished in its own 
dust. For we may take up arms against the evil thought, 
we may rally the higher powers of our souls, and call in 
the might of a Mightier to put the evil and its author to 
flight, yet this we seldom do till it has already found 
some place within us.’ The fiery darts may have been 
quenched almost as soon as they alighted; they may not 
therefore have set on fire in us the whole ‘ course of 
nature’ (Jam. iii. 6); but they should have been warded 
off and extinguished, before they alighted, by that shield 
of faith, which the apostle bids us to assume against them 
(Ephes. vi. 16). Ours may have been but a moment’s 

‘ There is in respect of the sin, to adopt a fine distinction of Peter Lom- 
bard and some others of the Schoolmen, the propassio or inception, even 
where there is not the passio. Few have exercised a keener moral oversight 
of their own hearts than Thomas 4 Kempis, and he traces thus the genesis of 
evil in the heart of man (De Jmit. Christ. i. 13. 5): Primo occurrit menti 
simplex cogitatio ; deinde fortis imaginatio ; postea delectatio et motus pravus 
et assensio. Itaque paulatim ingreditur hostis malignus ex toto, dum illi non 


resistitur in principio. 
? See Origen, De Prine. iii. 2. 4. 


THE TEMPTATION. 21 


acquiescence in the temptation. But thus momentary 
and seemingly involuntary as it was, and graciously and 
surely as it will be included in the daily forgiveness, yet 
even this moment during which the evil was not abhorred 
and loathed is irreconcilable with the idea of a perfect 
holiness ; for this is as a mirror whose perfect bright- 
ness no lightest breath has ever troubled or tarnished for 
an instant. Of course the reconciliation of an absolute 
sinlessness in Christ with the reality of the temptations to 
which He was exposed lies in this, that there was never 
in Him this momentary delectation ; even as there need 
not be in us; and would not be, if we always were, and 
had always in time past been, upon our highest guard. 
It is not of the necessity of a temptation that it should in 
the least defile. The fact that it does so, is only the sad 
accident and adjunct of too many of ours, even of those 
against which sooner or later we take up arms, and by 
God’s grace do not suffer them to embody themselves in 
sinful acts, or even in sinful desires deliberately enter- 
tained. So naturally in the estimate which we form of 
the matter does sin follow on temptation, that when the 
apostle had affirmed of Christ that He was ‘in all points 
tempted like as we are,’ he counts it needful at once to 
add, ‘yet without sin’ (Heb. iv. 15), without the sinful 
results which in men almost inevitably follow.* 

It is quite true that even from these temptations them- 
selves we may derive good; that they, even with issues 


* Bengel has some good words here on the promptness of our Lord’s 
resistance to each proffered temptation: Quomodo autem sine peccato ten- 
tatus, compati potest tentatis cwm peccato? In intellectu, multo acrius 
anima Salvatoris percepit imagines tentantes, quam nos infirmi; in voluntate 
tam celeriter incursum earum retudit, quam ignis aque guttulam sibi 
objectam. 


22 THE TEMPTATION. 


sorrowful for the time as these, may yet be to us sources 
of ultimate strength; that thus it may prove with us as 
with the oyster, which stops with a precious pearl the 
hole in its shell which was originally a disease; as with 
the broken limb, which, having been set, may be stronger 
than if it never had been broken. It may fare with us as 
islanders of the Southern Ocean fancy that it fares with 
them; counting, as they do, that the strength and valour 
of the warrior whom they have slain in battle passes into 
themselves, as their rightful inheritance ; for so it proves 
indeed with the Christian man and the temptations which 
he conquers and slays; and this, even though the victory 
may have been won not without hurts to himself, gotten 
in the conflict. The strength which lay in the temptation — 
has shifted its seat, and passed over into the man who has 
overcome the temptation." The great Church writers of 
all times, all to whom any largeness of utterance has been 
granted, who have bravely looked man’s true condition 
in the face, have not feared to speak bold words on this 
matter ; words indeed, like all other words on the subject 
of grace, capable of being wrested and abused by the 
licentious and falsehearted, of being therefore held up by 


* Our theologians of the seventeenth century were fond of illustrating 
this truth by aid of the legend that the viper’s flesh (θηριακή, from θηρίον, see 
Acts xxviii. 5), ‘ theriac,’ ‘ triacle,’ and last of all ‘ treacle,’ was the most potent 
antidote for the viper’s bite. Thus Jeremy Taylor: ‘There is a ὑπερνικῶμεν 
in St. Paul. We are more than conquerors. Non solum viperam terimus, 
sed ex δὰ antidotum conficimus. We kill the viper and make treacle of 
him ; ὁ. 6. not only escape from, but get advantage from temptations.’ And 
Hales: ‘ Wonderful, therefore, is the power οἵ ἃ Christian; who not only 
overcomes and conquers and kills the viper, but, like the skilful apothecary, 
makes antidote and treacle of him.’ So too Gurnall: ‘The saints’ ex- 
periences help them to a sovereign treacle made of the scorpion’s own flesh 
(which they through Christ have slain), and that hath a virtue above all 
others to expel the venom of Satan’s temptations from the heart.’ 


THE TEMPTATION. 23 


the timid as antinomian provocations ; but words which 
for all this ought not the less to be spoken. Such Augus- 
tine abounds in, as often as he treats of St. Paul’s thorn 
in the flesh, or of St. Peter’s fall; yet always keeping 
within just limits ; which limits another overpasses when, 
treating of the last and of all the spiritual gains which in 
the end the apostle obtained through it, he exclaims, 
O feliz culpa! A fault or sin is never ‘happy,’ is always 
unhappy ; it is ever ‘infelx culpa, whatever good by the 
grace of God and by that wondrous alchemy of heaven 
which draws gold from dross, may be educed from it; 
and those who employ any other language or think any 
other thought about sin, are perilously near, however 
little they may guess it, to them whom the apostle Paul 
has denounced (Rom. iii. 5-8). 

But this, the absolute rejection and repudiation of every 
suggestion in any way contrary to the perfect will of God, 
a repudiation in every case reaching to the earliest mo- 
ment of its presentation to Him whereunto it is possible 
in imagination to travel back, this is not all. There is 
another point of difference between Christ’s temptations 
and ours; namely, that all our Lord’s temptations were 
addressed to Him from without, were distinct suggestions 
of the Evil Spirit." Those who, in their anxiety todo away 
with an external Tempter, or from any other motive, 
resolve the Temptation into an internal conflict with 
thoughts of self-indulgence, vain-glory, ambition, disturb, 


1 Gregory the Great (Moral. xxiv. 11): Hostis noster quanto magis nos 
sibi rebellare conspicit, tanto amplius expugnare contendit. Eos enim 
pulsare negligit, quos quieto jure possidere se sentit. Hoc enim in seipso 
Dominus sub quidam dispensatione figuravit, qui diabolum non nisi post 
baptisma se tentare permisit, ut signum nobis quoddam future conversionis 
innueret, quod membra ejus postquam ad Deum proficerent, tunc acriores 
tentationum insidias tolerarent. 


24 THE TEMPTATION. 


whether they are aware of it or no, that image of a perfect 
holiness which is essential to the character and office of a 
Redeemer ; who only as He was Himself without sin could 
save others from their sins; but who would not, if this 
were admitted, have been without it. We cannot con- 
ceive of the temptation of the first Adam reaching him 
except from without. That he should have been his own 
tempter is irreconcilable even with the more negative 
holiness which we ascribe to him. It would have been 
infinitely more inconsistent with the more positive holiness 
of the second Adam.’ One of Schleiermacher’s most gifted 
pupils, who finished his brief career while as yet it was 
uncertain in what camp he would ultimately be found,’ 


* Gregory the Great (Hom. 16 in Hvang.): Sciendum nobis est, quia 
tribus modis tentatio agitur, suggestione, delectatione, et consensu. Et nos 
cum tentamur plerumque in delectationem, aut etiam in consensum labimur, 
quia de carnis peccato propagati, in nobis ipsis etiam gerimus unde certa- 
mina toleremus. Deus vero, qui in utero Virginis incarnatus, in mundum 
sine peccato venerat, nihil contradictionis in semetipso tolerabat. Tentari 
ergo per suggestionem potuit, sed ejus mentem peccati delectatio non mo- 
mordit. Atque ideo omnis diabolica illa tentatio foris non intus fuit. 
Compare F. Spanheim (Dud. Hvang. li.): Distinguendum inter tentationem 
admotam et admissam, inter suggestionem mali externam et internam, inter 
suggestionem insinuatam et receptam. Tentatio illa ratione tentatoris mala 
erat, non ratione tentati, admota quippe Christo duntaxat, non admissa, 
externa non interna, insinuata tantum non recepta. Camero (Myrothec. Lvang. 
on Heb. iv. 13, p. 315) has a lively illustration: Tentatus fuit igitur Christus 
in omnibus, et quidem quod ad sensum doloris attinet, eidem ratione qué 
nos; sine peccato tamen, quod nobis non contingit. Nam (utamur enim 
hoc exemplo) quantumvis aquam puram et limpidam exagites, non fit tur- 
bida; sed si aquam puram quidem, ut videtur, sed incujus ima parte cenum 
est vel limus, agitaveris, continuo qua visa est pura aqua, videtur lutulenta 
aut certe turbidula. 

2 Usteri. He has two articles on the Temptation in the Theol. Stud. und 
Krit. 1829, p. 449; 1832, p. 768; from the former of which my citation is 
taken. Nothing can be more masterly than the manner in which he deals 
not with this only, but with all the attempts toexplain away the Temptation, 
which at different times have been proposed; showing the inner contradictions 
which they involve; though, having effectually done this, he cannot be 
content without adding another attempt of his own. 


THE TEMPTATION. 25 


has on this point some admirable remarks: ‘ It is not dif- 
ficult to draw a very attractive picture of the inner 
temptation of Jesus, such as shall not be unlike the Choice 
of Hercules, standing, as Prodicus has described him, at 
the point where the two ways separated before him. One 
may find it also comforting and elevating that Christ was 
in all points tempted like as are we. Only how stands it 
then with what follows, “ yet without sin,” if we examine 
that statement psychologically and dogmatically? For 
first of all it must be remembered that if such an inner 
struggle and conflict of thoughts existed in the mind of. 
Jesus, and if He remained for an instant undecided and 
doubtful in regard of them, then both trains of thought 
must be regarded as his own, and the possibility of a 
decision upon one side as well as upon the other be 
admitted. Hereby Jesus will be coordinated with all other 
men, in whom the conflict of the good with the evil finds 
place; and we must conceive of this conflict not merely 
in the beginning of his public career; but where once a 
struggle has found place, it can revive again, needs nothing 
more than the suitable conditions to reproduce it; and 
only through patience and perseverance can a skill in the 
vanquishing of temptation be attained. This psychological 
consequence excludes the hypothesis of such an inward | 
struggle as was limited to one certain moment of time ᾿ 
and there would be nothing else but to say, “Jesus had ] 
within Him besides the good also an evil principle, against 
which He needed to be ever on his guard, though it is 
only in the history of the Temptation that this struggle is 
symbolically attached to a definite moment in his life.” But 
were Jesus constituted so, then were He not the Christ, but 
a man as others are, submitted to the same conditions, with 


26 THE TEMPTATION. 


a flesh and spirit contrary to one another; consequently 
not a Redeemer, but Himself needing a redemption ; and 
not only the words in St. John on his oneness with the 
Father, but those in the other Gospels on his dignity as 
Messiah, are either not authentic; or, if He actually spoke 
them, He either deluded Himself or deceived mankind.’* 

In the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages the dis- 


1 H. de 5. Victore, the Augustine of the Middle Ages, has an interesting 
passage on this matter (De Sacram. 11, pars 1, ὁ. 7): Sunt alii qui de 
affectibus humanis in Christo (quos secundum veritatem natures cum humani- 
tate et in humanitate suscepit) quedam non solum falsa sed horrenda etiam 
affrmare non timuerunt. Quia enim apostolus ait, Non habemus Pontificem 
qui non possit compati infirmitatibus nostris, tentatum autem per omnia: 
asserunt humanum affectum in Christo motus etiam vitiorum sensisse, absque 
consensu tamen rationis : secundum eam concupiscendi rationem qué nos qui 
peccatores sumus ex illd originali corruptione quam portamus illicitos ap- 
petitus, et motus concupiscentia surgentis et vitii tentantis delectationem 
etiam inviti sentire solemus. Hos autem motus idcirco Christum in carne 
sud voluntarie sustinuisse, ut quasi illis tentantibus resistendo victor existeret, 
quatenus et sibi tentationem vitiorum superando premium justitie acquireret, 
et nobis in tentatione positis resistendi et vincendi in semetipso exemplum 
formaret. Sed absit a sensu Christiano ut ullam in illé carne sacrosancté 
Agni immaculati inordinatw delectationis et concupiscentia illicite titilla- 
tionem aliquo modo fuisse, aut dicat, aut credat; qui si vel aliquam prave 
delectationis radicem aut motum concupiscendi inordinatum in illé fuisse 
diceremus, profecto ab omni vitio liberam negaremus. Quomodo autem 
vitium mundaret, si vitium portaret? motus quippe inordinatus ex infirmi- 
tate concupiscendi surgens cum ips’ tantum corruptione de qua oritur, non 
solum pcena est, sed culpa: qua tamen in baptizatis ad damnationem non 
imputatur, quia per gratiam nove regenerationis excusatur. Hac tamen 
corruptio per gratiam Sacramenti non quidem accipit ut culpa non sit, sed 
ut damnabilis non sit.... Quapropter illam infirmitatem humane natures 
que peena est, solum cum susceptione carnis Christum assumsisse veraciter 
dicimus: illam vero, qui sic poana est ut etiam culpa sit, nullatenus admisisse 
indubitanter affirmamus. Neque enim sic victorem vitiorum dicere volumus, 
ut eum ipsa que vinceret vitia portisse aliquando ac sensisse dicamus. 
Propterea enim per solam pcenam infirmari consensit, ut eos qui et in culpa 
et in pend wgrotabant, primum a culpa justificaret, postea a pcend liberaret. 
Compare the careful words of Augustine himself (Op. Jmperf. con. Jul. iv. 
48): Non dicimus nos Christum, felicitate carnis a nostris sensibus se- 
questrate, cupiditatem vitiorum sentire non potuisse; sed dicimus, eum 
perfectione virtutis, et non per carnis concupiscentiam procreaté carne, 
cupiditatem non habuisse vitiorum. 


THE TEMPTATION. 27 


cussion was carried on with considerable animation whether 
a possibility of not sinning (a posse non peccare) or an 
impossibility of sinning (a non posse peccare) should be 
ascribed to the Lord. The first had been, in the patristic 
period, the position of Theodore of Mopsuestia and of as 
many as, without being actually Nestorians, had yet theo- 
logical tendencies which inclined them to advance as far 
as might be in that direction; while the second had been 
maintained by Augustine. It was with this, as with so 
many of the earlier discussions, which were resumed and 
carried out yet further in the period of the medieval 
revival of theology; Abelard, as was naturally to be 
expected, taking up the position of Theodore of Mop- 
suestia, Anselm and others upholding the Augustinian 
teaching.’ This question could never have been so much 
as started, except ina Nestorian severance of the Lord 
into two persons, and thus in the contemplation of a 
human person in Him as at some moment existent apart 
from the divine. When we ascribe to Him two natures, 
but these at no time other than united in the one person 
of the Son of God, the whole question at once falls to the 
ground. And such is the Church’s faith. Christ was 
perfect man in the sense of having every thing belonging 
to the completeness of the human nature; but the person 
is the Son of God; his human body and soul at the very 
moment of their union with one another were also united 
with the Eternal Word, so that there is not, nor ever has 
been, any human person to contemplate, or in regard of 
whom to put this question ; while in respect of the Christ, 
and in the manhood after it was taken up into the God- 


* Neander, Kirch. Gesch. vol. v. p. 968. 


28 THE TEMPTATION. 


head, even Abelard himself does not ascribe to Him the 
possibility of sinning.’ 

When it is asked, as it continually has been, Where is 
the worth of an obedience which could not have not been 
rendered? where is-the glory of not sinning on the part 
of One who could not sin? the question has its rise in the 
confusion of a moral and a physical necessity. God 
cannot lie, God cannot do evil; but shall we therefore 
cease to praise and glorify Him for his holiness and truth? 
He cannot, because He will not. The angels now cannot 
sin; they have so drunk in the glory of God, that, as we 
believe, they are lifted above the possibility of falling. 
But does it therefore follow that their obedience, then 
when they might have followed those ‘who kept not their 
first estate, but left their own habitation’ (Jude 6), had 
a worth; which now that they cannot, it has ceased to 
possess? There is something better and higher, as 
Augustine and Anselm have taught, than the Uberum 
arbitrium, even though that should on each separate occa- 
sion of choice choose the good; and that better is the 
libertas, the beata necessitas boni; which so soon as the 
creature has attained, it would certainly be strange to 
affirm of it that this highest has reduced it to the state 
of the lowest, to the condition of stocks and stones, 
which indeed cannot do wrong, but for the same causes 
that hinder them from this, can as little do right. 
When two antagonists enter the lists, our moral certainty 


* Ad Rom. p. §39: Cum hominem qui Deo unitus est, possibile sit peccare, 
non tamen postquam unitus est vel dum unitus est. Christum vero, i. e. 
Deum simul ef hominem modis omnibus impossibile est peccare, cum vide- 
licet ipsum Christi nomen Dei et hominis exprimat unionem. 

* See on this matter a very interesting discussion by Anselm, Cur Deus 
Homo ? ii, το. 


THE TEMPTATION. 29 


that one will overcome, may take away the breathless 
expectation and interest with which we might otherwise 
mark the several stages of the conflict, but cannot affect 
the real excellence and merit of the victor. 

But all this, namely that the temptations were thus pre- 
sented from without and not born from within, and, again, 
that they found not even a moment’s acquiescence, con- 
sent and entertainment in that holy soul, does not hinder 
in the least that what was offered may have presented 
itself as infinitely desirable. In the reality of the tempta- 
tions we are bound to believe, nor will it be very hard to 
understand, in part at least, where that reality consisted 
when we a little consider them one by one, which now it is 
time to do. Τὸ these considerations some words of Pro- 
fessor Mill on this very matter may prove a fitting introduc- 
tion. ‘If,’ he says, ‘the highest virtue does not exclude 
that instinct inseparable from humanity, to which pain is 
an object of dread and pleasure of desire; which prefers 
ease and quiet to tumult and vexation, the regard and 
esteem of others to their scorn and aversion; to which ill- 
requited toil or experienced unkindness are sources of 
corroding anguish and depression ;—this very conjuncture 
which presents but one of these objects of dread as the 
concomitant of doing God’s will, or associates one of their 
desirable opposites with neglect or disobedience—every 
such conjuncture must produce a conflict between duty 
and these necessary instincts of humanity, sufficient to 
constitute temptation in the strictest sense.’ ? 


‘And when the Tempter came unto Him, he said, If 
Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be 


+ Five Sermons on the Temptation, 1844, p. 37. 


20 THE TEMPTATION. 


made bread. A certain external likeness which might 
exist between stones and bread (cf. Matt. vii. 9) explains 
why on those more than on anything else Christ should 
have been challenged to display his power. It has been 
often asked, Putting his suggestion thus, did the Tempter 
indeed know Him whom he assailed to be the Son of God? 
or was the suggestion merely tentative, to make Him re- 
veal Himself, and show by his reply what manner of person, 
and clothed with what power, He was? The question has 
been variously answered. The ancients -probably are 
right, who for the most part reply, that the Evil Spirit 
was thus taking the measure of Him whom by a true 
instinct he recognized for his mortal foe;’ fearing the 
worst; but at the same time still uncertain with whom he 
had to do. The first words which he utters, ‘Jf Thou be 
the Son of God, Christ was destined to hear again 
in the hour of a keener suffering even than this. He 
should be again taunted and provoked, and in exactly the 
same language (Matt. xxvii. 40), to prove his Messiahship, 
and in this very act of proving to render void the whole 
work which as Messiah He came to accomplish; but then 
as now He is able to leave the vindication of his Sonship 
in his Father’s hands. 

That to which Satan here challenges the Lord, to ‘ com- 
mand that these stones be made bread, was not sinful in it- 
self, but would have been sinful for Him. To have complied, 
would have been a defeat of his whole mediatorial work. If 
on each sharper pressure of the world’s suffering and pain 
upon Himself, He had fallen back on the power which as 


* So Hilary: Erat in diabolo de metu suspicio, non de suspicione cognitio. 
Augustine (De Civ. Dei, xi. 21): Dubitavit de illo damonum princeps, 
eumque tentavit, an Christus esset explorans, quantum se tentari ipse permisit, 
ut hominem quem gerebat ad nostra imitationis temperaret exemplum. 


΄ 


THE TEMPTATION. 31 


Son of God He possessed, and so exempted Himself from 
the common lot of humanity, where would have been the 
fellow-man, the overcomer of the world by his human 
faith, and not by his divine power?’ The whole life of 
faith would have disappeared. At his Incarnation the 
Lord had merged his lot with the lot of the race; the 

temptation is, that He should separate Himself from them — 
anew: ‘Son of God, put forth thy power.’ When in 
some besieged and famine-stricken city, when in hard 
straits during the march through some waterless desert, 
a captain or commander refuses special exemptions from 
the lot of his suffering fellow-soldiers, when a Cato pours 
upon the sands the single draught of water which 
has been procured in the African desert and brought for 
his drinking,’ such a one in his lower sphere acts out what 
the Lord in the highest sphere of all acted now. His 
miracles shall be all for the needs of others, never for his 
own.® He who made the water wine, could have made 


* Aquinas: Diabolus justitia Dei, non potentid, superandus fuit. Com- 
pare Augustine, De Trin. xiii. 14. 
3 Lucan, Pharsal. ix. 510: 
Excussit galeam, suffecitque omnibus unda. 
Compare Plutarch, Alex. 42. 
* All this I ventured long ago to embody in a brief poem: 
‘He might have reared a palace at a word, 
Who sometimes had not where to lay his head ; 
Time was, and He who nourished crowds with bread, 
Would not one meal unto Himself afford. 
Twelve legions girded with angelic sword 
Were at his beck, the scorned and buffeted ; 
He healed another’s scratch ; his own side bled, 
Side, feet, and hands, with cruel piercings gored. 
Oh wonderful the wonders left undone! 
And scarce less wonderful than those He wrought; 
Oh self-restraint, passing all human thought, 
To have all power, and be as having none! 
Oh self-denying love, which felt alone 
For needs of others, never for its own!’ 


32 THE TEMPTATION. 


the stones bread ; but to that He was solicited by the need 
of others, to this only by his own. And this abstinence 
of self-help was the law of his whole life, a life as won- 
derful in the miracles which it left undone as in those 
which it wrought. 

The stress of this, as of each other of the subsequent 
temptations, consisted in the fact that what Satan proposed 
did lie in the final purposes of the ministry of the Son 
of God; and that it was only in its premature anticipa- 
tions that the sin consisted. Thus it did lie in final 
issues of his ministry for man that the desert should 
blossom as a rose (Isai. xxxv. 1; lxv. 29), that all strait- 
ness, hunger, poverty, want, all sweat of the brow, hardly 

‘ wringing from the soil the pittance of the day, and leaving 
little or no opportunity for higher mental or moral culture, 
that all these consequences of the primeval curse upon the 
earth (Gen. iii. 17, 18) should cease and come to an end 
—that, so to speak, the stones should become bread. But 
the temptation was, to begin instead of ending with this, 
to bring about an outer world of abundance otherwise 
than as the expression and the result of an inner kingdom 
of righteousness. And in the Lord’s refusal to do this is 
involved the condemnation of every plan for redressing 
the hard lot. of humanity which does not begin from the 
root, which thinks to make men happier without making 
them holier, all communist schemes, all the profane mil- 
lenarianism of an Owen or a Fourrier. It is no heavenly 
root, but quite another, out of which these grow. They 
‘are not of good, and cannot come to good. Yet who will 
dare measure the strength of this temptation, as it may 
have presented itself to Him who beheld with a compas- 
sion at once human and divine the infinite toil and want 


THE TEMPTATION. 33 


of the children of men; for I believe we mistake alto- 
gether when we find in his own immediate hunger that 
which gave the whole, or even the chief, stress and force 
to this temptation. Standing as He did at the centre of 
humanity, and commanding all the diverging lines to their 
extreme circumference, that hunger was to Him but as 
the key and interpreter to all the hunger, all the need, all 
the distress which the children of Adam had ever felt, or 
should ever feel, until the great and glorious day when 
the primeval curse should be lightened from off the earth, 
and it should again yield its foison with the free bounty 
of Paradise. His own hunger was included; but this did 
not exclude, rather took in that of every one besides. 
And to be able to stay all this, to speak the word and 
bring it all to an end, who, with a sinful and therefore a 
selfish heart, is at all in a position to estimate what this 
temptation was to the great Lover of the bodies and the 
souls of men? But now for the answer. 

The Tempter had said, ‘Jf Thou be the Son of God? 
Christ does not reply, ‘I am;’ nor find here, as He easily 
might, a reason for not complying with the challenge ; 
since answering so, He would indeed have overcome the 
adversary, but He would have overcome him only for Him- 
self, and not also for us. No other, being only a man, and 
not in that peculiar sense ‘the Son of God, could have 
silenced him in the same way. The answer would have 
stood apart, and would have fitted no other lips but his 
own.’ But the answer which He gives is one which every 
other may employ as freely as He did: ‘Man shall not live 


* Ambrose (Δ. in Luc. v. 20): Non enim quasi Deus utitur potestate 
(quid enim mihi proderat?) sed quasi homo, commune sibi arcessit auxilium. 
Of. Augustine, Hnarr. 2* in Ps. cx. το, 11. 

D 


34 THE TEMPTATION. 


by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God.’ He throws his broad shield not,merely 
over Himself, but over all those whom He has called his 
brethren, and with whom in his Incarnation He has made 
common part and lot; and saying, ‘Man shall not live’ 
He declares that He will not separate Himself from his 
race. These words are drawn, as indeed are both the 
other passages which He cites, not merely from the Old 
Testament, but from the history of Israel’s forty years’ 
temptation in the wilderness, and from that as it is re- 
sumed in the Book of Deuteronomy. And this certainly 
is not for nothing, nor without its significance; but finds 
its explanation in the fact that Israel was the figure of 
the Son of man, was ‘the servant of God,’ that should 
have fulfilled all righteousness, but did not; in which 
fact we must seek the justification of St. Matthew’s use 
of Hosea’s words, ‘Out of Egypt have I called my 
Son’ (Matt ii. 13; cf. Hos. xi. 1). Christ, as there has 
been already occasion to urge, is not merely the second 
Adam, but the true Israel, and the true servant of 
God (Isai. xlii. 1), who as such should testify by his obe- 
dience that man truly lives only in and by the everlasting 
word. 

The words were originally spoken by Moses in reference 
to the manna: ‘He fed thee with manna which thou 
knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that He 
might make thee know that man doth not live by bread 
only; but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of the Lord doth man live’ (Deut. vii. 3). But 
this being so, what, it may be asked, was their special 
appropriateness at a moment like the present? They 
had this fitness. In the giving of the manna, and in the 


THE TEMPTATION. 35 


feeding of the people thereby, lay a signal proof that 
God was not limited to ordinary means; but, as then He 
created ‘a new thing’ with which to sustain his people, 
so now He could feed one who trusted in Him, altogether 
without any external helps and appliances whatever. God 
is Himself the nourisher, and not the bread or anything 
else. The manna was but the help to a weak faith; for 
that did not really nourish any, but only God’s might 
which worked in and through the manna. And thus the 
Lord does not mean by this quotation that man wants 
something besides bread, has a soul which must be sus- 
tained by heavenly food, as his body is by earthly; and 
that if that be fed, it imports little how this may fare. 
His words are still more to the point. The creative word, 
the ῥῆμα Θεοῦ, which alone imparts to the bread its sus- 
taining power, can sustain, even as He is confident that 
in the present need it will sustain, apart from the bread.! 
The answer is in fact a keener way of saying, ‘I have 
meat to eat that ye know not of (John iv. 31). I am not 
pressed, as thou suggestest, and as thou wouldst fain have 
Me to believe; I live upon God.’? ‘God, as Jeremy 
Taylor has said, applying these words, ‘will certainly give 
us bread, and till He does we can live by the breath of 


1 Cocceius : Potest Deus vivificare absque pane, et sine verbo Dei ne panis 
quidem ad yitam est. Spanheim (Dub. Hoang. 58): Tentator objiciebat, vel 
fame ipsi esse pereundum, vel lapides convertendos in panem, alioquin 
nullum dari medium ipsius conservandi. Immo, inquit Dominus, media in- 
numera alia dari possunt preter panem: quamcunque enim rem placet Deo 
adhibere ad sustentationem hominis ea suflicere potest, vel verbum solum 
promissionis egrediens ex ore Domini. 

* It isa beautiful Jewish legend to which Philo (De Soman. i. 6) refers, 
that Moses during his forty days’ fast on Mount Horeb was fed by the melo- 
dies of heaven, the music of the spheres—by which he goes on to say, if 
our ears were now purged to drink them in, we too might equally be sus- 
tained. Not unlike this in spirit is the saying quoted by Schoetgen (Hor. 
Heb. vol. i. p. 87): Justi perfecti ex splendore Schechinw comedunt. 

D2 


36 THE TEMPTATION. 


his mouth, by the word of God, by the light of his coun- 
tenance,*by the refreshment of his promises. If the 
fleshpots be removed He can alter the appetite; and 
when our stock is spent, He can also lessen the necessity ; 
or if that continues, He can drown the sense of it na 
deluge of patience and resignation.’ * 


‘Then the devil taketh Him up into the holy city, and 
setteth Him on a pinnacle of the temple. Characteristically 
enough it is St. Matthew who thus calls Jerusalem ‘ the 
holy city” To him, the Jew, it was eminently such (cf. 
BAVil.y 593 ideal. ,xlviil., 2.3, la. 1,3 Dan. ἀπ 24s ere 
R24. Rxi.@ 3, eel. xxxvi.,.19;,1 Macc, Ὁ. Ὁ 
city of the Great King’ (Matt. v. 35). In the parallel 
record of St. Luke, it is simply ‘Jerusalem.’ I should be 
unwilling to interpret this ‘taketh’ with Hammond, as 
though it were, ‘carried Him through the air;’ for such 
a rapture and flight, a yielding of Himself so far to the 
will of the adversary, seems inconsistent with the dignity 
which in the midst of all his humiliation the Son evermore 
preserved. They who will have it so, observe that it is 
nothing strange if He who allowed Himself to be buffeted, 
scourged, crucified by the servants of the devil, should 
yield Himself thus far to the violence of their master ; 
and that all which concerns us is to keep in mind that it 
was a violence which could not have been exercised upon 
Him, unless He had willingly submitted Himself to 1." 
But certainly the language which St. Matthew uses does 
not require, hardly justifies, such a meaning as this. The 


Life of Christ, i, 9. 
? Deyling: Noliin hic re diaboli potentiam sed potius Servatoris pati- 
entiam mirari. 


THE TEMPTATION. 37 


word we have translated ‘taketh’ (παραλαμβάνει) is the 
same which all three Evangelists employ when they 
would describe the Lord’s leading up with Him his chosen 
apostles to the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. xvii. 1; 
Mark ix. 2; Luke ix. 28; and often elsewhere). That 
which may have in part induced this interpretation, 
namely, the supposition that the ‘pinnacle’ of the temple’ 
was some giddy point, unattamable except by such aérial 
flight, is a mistake. Whatever it may have been, it cer- 
tainly was not this; for in the history of the martyrdom 
of James the Just, given by Hegesippus and preserved for 
us by Eusebius,’ the martyr is set on this same ‘ pinnacle, 
which he could only have reached by ordinary means, 
that from thence he may harangue the people below, and 
when he disappoints the expectation of the Jews who had 
set him there, is by them cast headlong down. 

‘And saith unto Him, If Thou be the Son of God, cast 
Thyself down; for i is written, He shall give his angels 
charge concerning Thee, and in their hands they shall bear 
Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash thy foot against a 
stone. The temple was plainly the fitting place for this, 
the peculiarly theocratic temptation, as the wilderness 
had been for that addressed to the fleshly appetite, and 
as the high mountain should be for the temptation yet in 
store from the world; even as it has been fancifully sug- 
gested that the Tempter assumed different shapes in suc- 
cession, an eremite in the wilderness, an angel of light on 


? IIreptyiov, which the grammarians explain by ἀκρωτήριον, the diminu- 
tive of πτέρυξ, a wing, pinna or penna in Latin; the latter being the form in 
which the word, literally employed, assumes; while pinna, with its diminu- 
tive pinnaculum, is the winglike lappet of a building. For the different 
views of what this πτερύγιον of the temple actually was, see Deyling, Odss. 
Sac., vol. ii. p. 371 

Shin, fee tl. 23. 


28 THE TEMPTATION. 


this pinnacle of the temple, a king when he offered on 
the mountain the world-kingdoms to the Lord. Ex- 
panding this temptation a little, we may better realize 
to ourselves wherein consisted its enticing power. What 
the Tempter suggested may have been very nearly as 
follows: ‘ Be acknowledged the Christ at once. Give of 
thy own free accord that which those in whose hands it 
will lie to accept or reject Thee will so often demand, 
namely, “a sign from heaven” (Matt. xii. 38; xvi. 1; 
Luke xii. 54, 56). Descend with a pomp of angels up- 
holding and upbearing Thee, in the midst of an admiring 
people. Thou art appointed to be the Christ. Why take 
the way of a long and tedious recognition? Why con- 
sent to be despised and rejected—bringing all which thus 
Thou wilt bring of evil on Thyself and on them that 
reject Thee, when by one noble venture of faith, having 
moreover a Scripture warrant for this, thou mightest at 
a single bound leap to that remote consummation which 
is indeed in the intentions and purposes of God ?’ 

With what marvellous skill has the Tempter shifted in 
an instant the whole line of his assault. In that first 
“temptation he urged the Lord to a distrust of his Father’s 
love, so that He must help Himself, if He is indeed to be 
helped at all; but now he urges not indeed to trust that 
love overmuch, for this is impossible, but to put it to the 
proof in a way of his own choosing, and not of God’s 
appointing. If he cannot entangle Him in the sin of 
difidentia, perhaps then in that of prefidentia,—if such 
a word may be allowed. Satan too has learned some- 
thing else in that first encounter ; he has learnt that the 
Scripture is the law of Christ’s life; the sphere in which 


He lives and moves. On a word of that Scripture the 
“ 


THE TEMPTATION. 39 


Lord had grounded his refusal to make the stones bread. 
Here then is a word of that same Scripture, which 
should induce Him to consent to that which is now put 
before Him. ‘Makest Thou so much of that word? 
Hopest Thou on its assurance for such a miracle in thy 
behalf? Then see in that which I now set before Thee, 
how Thou mayest show yet more gloriously thy con- 
fidence in the favour of God toward Thee.’ 

That ninety-first Psalm which the adversary quotes, is 
written not concerning the Son of God in particular, but 
concerning the faithful generally. Yet for all this it can- 
not be said that there was any abusing or mis-quoting of 
it in applying the promise which it contains, as Satan now 
does, to Christ; since whatever was written concerning 
the faithful in general, must be eminently true concerning 
Him who is the Head of the faithful. Origen then,’ it 
must be admitted, has not right here, when he accuses 
Satan of a fraudful transfer to Christ of what was written 
about others, and in this respect of perverting Scripture ; 
an accusation which Chrysostom and Jerome repeat. 
That there is and must be somewhere a lie in the appli- 
cation even of words of truth on the part of him who is 
a liar and only a liar is certain. He lies, as St. Bernard 
has very well shown, leaving out, as he does, one little 
clause, which would have altered the whole character of 
the quotation. ‘He shall give his angels charge con- 
cerning Thee, this much Satan cites; but the words 
following ‘to keep Thee in all thy ways,’ these he omits 
altogether.” But that to which he now challenged the 


1 Hom. 31. in Lue. 
3. Mendacium abscondens per Scripturam sicut omnes heretici, as Irengeus: 
observes (vy. 31); and none had greater experience of their devices, 


40 THE TEMPTATION. 


Lord was not ‘a way’ appointed by his heavenly Father 
for his treading, and in which as such He might be sure 
that he would not stumble (John xi. 9, 10), but a preci- 
pice from which He would have wantonly chosen to fling 
Himself down; and the promise of being kept in all his 
ways no one has a right to take to himself, who has 
exchanged his appointed ways for any such headlong 
precipices as that now suggested to the Lord." 

‘ Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not 
tempt the Lord thy God ;’ written, indeed, in almost every 
page of Scripture, but the special reference is to Deut. vi. 
16. But first, in that ‘ J¢ is written again’ of Christ, lies 
a great lesson, quite independent of that particular Scrip- 
ture which on this occasion He quotes, or of the use to 
which He turns it. There lies in it the secret of our 
safety and defence against all distorted use of isolated 


‘ 


passages in Holy Scripture. Only as we enter into the 
unity of Scripture, as it balances, completes, and explains 
itself, are we armed against error and delusion, excess or 
defect on this side or the other. Thus the retort, ‘/¢ zs 
written again, wust be of continual application ; for, 
indeed, what very often are heresies but onesided exag- 
gerated truths, truths rent away indeed from the body 


1 Bernard (Jn Ps. Quis Latitat, Serm. 15): Scriptum est, inquit, Quoniam 
angelis suis mandavit de te, et in manibus tollent te. Quid scriptum est, 
maligne, quid scriptum est? Angelis suis mandavit de te. Quid man- 
davit? Animadvertite et videte quoniam subticuit malignus et fraudulentus 
quod malignitatis sua commenta dissolveret. Quid enim mandavit? 
Nempe quod in psalmo sequitur: Ut custodiant te in omnibus viis tuis. 
Numguid in precipitiis? Qualis via hee de pinnaculo templi mittere se 
deorsum? Non est via hie, sed ruina; et si via, tua est, non illius. Frustra 
in tentationem capitis intorsisti, quod scriptum est ad corporis consolatio- 
nem. Delitzsch: Es ist nicht die Rede von Gefahren, die man aussucht, 
sondern von solchen, die den Gerechten ungesucht auf den Lebenswegen 
.begegnen. 


THE TEMPTATION. 41 


and complex of the Truth, without the balance of the 
counter-truth, which should have kept them in their due 
place, coordinated with other truths or subordinated to 
them; and so, because all such checks are wanting, not 
truth any more but error Ὁ 

It is a weapon at once offensive and defensive, a sun 
at once and a shield, which the Lord on this occasion 
draws from the armoury of God: ‘ Thou shalt not tempt 
the Lord thy God.” The same apparent difficulty which lies 
in St. James’ declaration that ‘God tempteth not any man’ 
(i. 13), when set over against so many other passages in 
which a tempting of man is ascribed to Him (Gen. xxii. 1; 
John vi. 6), lies also in St. James’ statement made at the 
same place that ‘God cannot be tempted’ as compared 
with so many other, in which men are charged with the 
sin, or warned against the sin, of tempting God; such as 
Exod. xvii. 2; Num. xiv. 22; Ps. Ixxviii. 18, 56; Acts 
v.9; xv. 10; and the present. But here, as there, the 
contradiction lies only on the surface, and as soon as we 
descend a little below this, it quite disappears. There is 
a sense in which men ‘ tempt’ God, as no doubt there is 
also a sense in which they cannot ‘tempt’ Him. They 
‘tempt’ God, when they mistrust the resources of his 
wisdom, his power, his goodness; when they will not 
believe Him on his simple word, but challenge Him to 
make present and immediate experiment of these before, 
they will give Him credit for possessing them. Thus 
when the children of Israel exclaimed, ‘Can God furnish 
a table in the wilderness?’ (Ps. Ixxviii. 19) this question 


> Tertullian (De Pudic. 16): Est hoe solenne perversis et idiotis et 
hereticis, alicujus capituli ancipitis occasione adversus exercitum senntiate- 
rum Instrumenti totius armari. 


42 THE TEMPTATION. 


of theirs was in the strictest sense of the word a ‘ tempting’ 
of God; as the Psalmist expressly declares ‘ They tempted 
God in their heart’—‘ they tempted God, and limited the 
Holy One of Israel’ (ver. 41). In like manner Ahaz 
refuses to ask a sign from God, sheltering himself behind 
the precept of Deut. vi. 16; and pretending to believe 
that to ask of God that sign which God bade him ask, 
would be such a ‘ tempting’ of Him as is there forbidden ; 
“1 will not ¢empt the Lord’ (Isai. vi. 12). Not otherwise 
we are told that the adversaries of the Lard ‘ came, and 
tempting desired that He would show them a sign from 
heaven’ (Matt. xvi. 1), that is, putting Him to the proof, 
refusing to accept, without this proof given, his claims 
to be the Messiah. And when Satan would have the 
Saviour to cast Himself down headlong from the pinnacle 
of the temple, this would have been in the strictest sense, 
as He Himself declares, a ‘tempting’ of the Lord his God, 
that is, a putting of Him to the proof, as being doubtful, 
until that proof was made, whether He would indeed help 
and save. 

God may ‘tempt’ manas often as He will; for there is 
always an element of weakness in every man, justifying 
the temptation, which shall either reveal this weakness to 
him through a fall, and thus send him to the source of all 
true strength, or through a victorious struggle with it, 
leave him in fuller possession of God’s strength than before. 
But men may never lawfully ‘tempt’ God, in whom there 
are no such discoveries to be made, and whom then they 
honour most, when they believe the highest, noblest, great- 
est things about Him to which their hearts can attain. It 
was for Christ to believe in the loving-kindness and faith- 
fulness of God, that He would uphold Him in all his ways, 


THE TEMPTATION. 43 


without ‘tempting’ or putting Him to proof, as the ad- 
versary had suggested. _ Such a tempting could only have 
sprung from a secret unbelief; and would have been for 
Him an abandonment at the outset, of that life of faith 
which He came to live on earth, and by which to over- 
come the Wicked One. 

In this refusal of Christ’s are implicitly condemned all 
who run before they are sent, who thrust themselves into 
perils to which they are not called ; all who would fain be 
reformers, but whom God has not raised up and equipped 
for the work of reformation; and who therefore for 
the most part bring themselves and their cause to- 
gether to shame, dishonour, and defeat; with all those 
who presumptuously draw drafts on the faithfulness of 
God, which they have no scriptural warrant to justify 
them in believing that He will honour. 

It is well known that in the different Gospels this 
second temptation and the third follow in different order. 
In St. Matthew the temptation to vainglory (‘ Cast Thyself 
down’) comes first, and that to worldliness (‘ Ad these 
things will I give Thee’) follows after; while in St. Luke 
first the kingdoms and their glory are offered, and only 
when these are rejected, the temptation to spiritual pride 
is suggested. Which, it may be asked, was the true, or 
rather the actual, succession? for both orders may in a 
deeper ideal, though not in an historic sense, be true. In 
favour of St. Luke’s it may be urged that spiritual wicked- 
nesses seem the latest and subtlest temptations of the 
Evil One; those who have overcome all other, are ex- 
posed to, and sometimes overcome by, these; the white 
devil, as one has said, being more to be feared than the 
black; and temptations arranged to follow in such a 


44 THE TEMPTATION. 


sequence and method as shall be most effectual (μεθοδεῖαι 
σλάνης) are especially attributed to Satan (Ephes. iv. 
14; vi. 11). But on the other hand, in favour of St. 
Matthew’s succession it may be said that the words, ‘ Get 
thee behind Me, Satan, would scarcely occur in the middle 
of the Temptation, being rather the final and authorita- 
tive dismissal of the Tempter, after which he would no 
longer presume, for the present at least, to molest the 
Lord. And altogether this fact seems to outweigh the 
arguments which support the other succession ; not to say 
that St. Matthew's ‘then’ (ver. 5) and ‘again’ (ver. 8) 
mark a closer knitting together of the incidents in the 
order of time than aught in the more loosely connected 
scenes in St. Luke.’ 


‘Again the devil taketh Him up into an exceeding high 
mountain, and sheweth Him all the kingdoms of the world 
and the glory of them; and saith unto Him, ΑἸ these 
things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship 
me. The inner connexion between this third temptation 
and that which went before may be as follows: ‘ Well, if 
Thou art not the Son of God, as is plain from thy in- 
ability to make bread, thy refusal to cast thyself boldly 
forth on the riches of his grace, worship me, and receive 
what I will give Thee, the kingdoms of the world and 

* In Greswell’s Dissertations there is one On the Order of the Temptations, 
vol. ii. p. 192. Von Meyer (Blatt. fir hihere Wahrheit, vol. v. p. 262) thinks 
the succession to have been differently given by the different Evangelists, of 
a purpose and for our instruction, because the order of these temptations is 
different in different men, and in the same man at different times. Aquinas, 
who has anticipated so much, has anticipated also this (Summ. Theol. pars 
3", qu. 41, art. 4): Videntur Evangelista diversum ordinem tenuisse; quia 
quandoque ex inani glorié venitur ad cupiditatem, quandoque e converso. 


Augustine (De Cons. Evang. ii. 16) does not absolutely decide in favour 
of one order or the other. 


THE TEMPTATION. 45 


the glory of them. By these last words I understand all 
which the kingdoms possessed of fairest, richest, best, the 
flower and crown of all their splendours gathered to a 
head (Isai. xxxix. 2; Matt. vi. 29; Rev. xxi. 25, 26). 
But before we proceed further it is worth while to enquire 
how we are to understand the ‘ shewing’ to Him of all these. 
An optical illusion is entirely inadmissible ; such is not 
reconcilable with the Church’s idea of her divine Head. It 
is quite impossible that in anything, great or small, He can 
have been played upon or deceived, least of all by the 
Spirit of 1165... That Satan pointed out the quarters in 
which the several kingdoms of the world lay, does not 
seem to me altogether to satisfy and exhaust the force of 
this ‘sheweth ; least of all when we bring in St. Luke’s 
‘in a moment of time : although many interpreters have 
been satisfied with such an explanation.’ Jeremy Taylor 
reaches out after something more : ‘ By an angelical power 
he draws into one centre species and ideas from all the 
kingdoms and glories of the world, and makes an ad- 
mirable map of beauties, and represents it to the eye 
of Jesus. But whatever the manner of the shewing 


* Grotius strangely enough, while he allows this (neque oculos neque vim 
imaginatricem Christi illusam puto), suggests notwithstanding a mere phan- 
tasmagoria of this kind: Nimirum quasi in picturé ponens [diabolus] 
ompem qui unquam esset regi fortune apparatum. The suggestion of 
Milton (Par. Reg. iv. 40) is different; and is not attended by the same 
objections : 

‘By what strange parallax or optic skill 
Of vision, multiplied through air, or glass 
Of telescope, were fruitless to enquire.’ 


2 Ἔν στιγμῇ xpsvou=év ἀτόμῳ͵ ἐν ῥιπῇ ὀφθαλμοῦ (x Cor. xv. 52). 

3 Origen: Διέγραψε τῷ λόγῳ τὴν οἰκουμένην,... πῶς γὰρ ἠδύνατο αὐτοὺς τοὺς 
τόπους εἰς ἕνα τόπον πρὸς θεωρίαν σωματικὴν ἀγαγεῖν; Maldonatus: Reipsd 
ostendisse, non ita ut viderit, sed ita ut cujusque regni plagam digito desig- 
naverit. Bengel: Per enumerationem et indigitationem fortasse. So 
Aquinas, Summ. Theol. pars 35, qu. 41, art. 4. 


46 THE TEMPTATION. 


was, a shewing rather than a telling is skilfully imagined, 
as might have been expected from the great artificer 
of falsehood. The eye is the inlet of desire; there 
is nothing so soon enticed and led away. ‘It is,’ as 
Bishop Andrews has said, ‘the broker between the 
heart and all wicked lusts that be in the world’ (Job 
xiao, 1,7). 

T have quoted the words in which this proffer of the king- 
doms of the world is made, as more briefly recorded by St. 
Matthew. At the same time the qualifying addition which 
appears in the report of St. Luke is very significant: ‘ Ad/ 
this power will I give Thee, and the glory of them ; for that 
is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. 
Liar as he is from the beginning, the Tempter does not 
venture to claim the kingdoms of the world and their glory 
as of absolute right his own. Manichzeans enough there 
are in the world, who believe that the devil is really its 
lord and king; but he in whose favour the Manichean 
explanation of the world’s riddle has been started, does not 
himself venture to assert it. The world is not Satan’s 
own; nor his at all except in so far as it has been 
‘delivered’ to him; that through it and the countless 
seductions which it offers he may on the one hand 
exercise and prove the faith of God’s elect, to their greater 
final reward, on the other seduce those who are waiting 
and willing to be seduced from their allegiance to their 
liege Lord and rightful king; or that in other ways he 
may work out the higher ends of God’s providence and 
grace. So far indeed it had been suffered to come into 
his hands ; he is now, in Christ’s own words, ‘ the prince 
of this world’ (John xii. 31), in the words of his apostle, 
‘the prince of the power of the air’ (Ephes. ii. 2), ‘the 


THE TEMPTATION. 47 


god of this world’ (2 Cor. iv. 4); able to give to those 
who serve him, ‘his power, and his seat, and great autho- 
rity’ (Rey. xii. 2). But whatever dominion he possesses 
in it, he possesses not of right, but by usurpation on his 
part, by permission upon God’s, even as he himself must 
acknowledge here. To him it might be said, as to one of 
his servants it was said, ‘ Thou couldest have no power at 
all, except it were given thee from above’ (John xix. 11). 
This was originally no wicked world (Gen. i. 31); a 
‘mundus’ indeed, but no ‘mundus immundus, as Au- 
gustine so often loves to declare. 

Satan is playing for a high stake, and does not grudge 
therefore to make a great offer. It is not often that 
Bishop Andrews allows himself in irony so fine and so 
effective as he does in one of his Sermons on the Tempta- 
tion; contrasting this offer, the kingdoms offered to 
Christ and rejected by Him, with the unutterably paltry 
bribes, the mess of pottage (Gen. xxv. 34), the Babylonish 
garment (Josh. vii. 21), the two changes of garments 
(2 Kin. v. 23), the thirty pieces of silver (Matt. xxvi. 15), 
for which we are so often contented to barter all. I 
cannot refuse to quote a part: ‘ There be some that will 
say, They were never tempted with kingdoms. It may 
well be; for it needs not, when less will serve. It was 
Christ only who was thus tempted; in Him lay a heroical 
mind that could not be allured with small matters. But 
with us it is nothing so, for we esteem far more basely of 
ourselves. We set our wares at a very easy price; he 
may buy us even dagger-cheap, as we say. He need 
never carry us so high as the mount. The pinnacle is 
high enough; yea, the lowest steeple in all the town would 
serve the turn. Or let him but carry us to the leads and 


48 THE TEMPTATION. 


gutters of our own houses, nay, let us but stand in our 
windows or our doors, if he will give us but so much as 
we can there see, he will tempt us throughly; we will 
accept it and thank him too. He shall not need to come 
to us with kingdoms. If he would come to us with thirty 
pieces, I am afraid many of us would play Judas. Nay, 
less than so much would buy a great sort, even ‘“ handfuls 
of barley and pieces of bread” (Ezek. xiii. 19). Yea 
some will not stick to buy and sell the poor for a pair of 
shoes, as Amos speaketh. . . . A matter of half a crown, 
or ten groats, a pair of shoes, or some such trifle will 
bring us on our knees to the devil.’ 

But this temptation, how mighty an attraction it must 
have had—not indeed that attraction for Him on whom 
it was now brought to bear, which it would possess 
for mean and vulgar souls; but one which the very love 


and pity and yearning sympathy for all the children of 
men that dwelt in Him, must have lent it. Nothing 
was more righteous than that all the kingdoms of the 
world should be Christ’s, nothing more certain than that 
He, as Messiah, should one day be heir of all. Feeling then 
and knowing Himself to be the rightful king of men, and 
to have the power of infinitely blessing them as their 
king, with such prophecies going before of his kingdom 
and what his kingdom should be, as Isai. xxxii. 1-8, 
Ps. lxxii., He must have unutterably desired, and it 
belonged to the perfection of his nature that He should 
so desire, that the kingdoms of the world should be his. 
How many bleeding hearts were waiting to be bound up 
by Him; how many who now sat in darkness were 
waiting for light from Him; what truths were waiting for 
Him to utter; what wrongs were waiting for «Him to 


THE TEMPTATION. 49 


redress, what strongholds of oppression for Him to cast 
down. The power of accomplishing all this, of redressing 
all the oppressions of the earth, of stanching all those 
fountains of tears, of imparting all that knowledge of his 
Father’s love, this was ‘the glory, the δόξα, which the 
royalty of the world wore in his sight; here was the 
allective force which this temptation possessed. We note 
ever, even among the sinful children of men, that the 
nobler the character of a man, the nobler also the sem- 
blance which a temptation, that is indeed to exercise any 
power upon him, must assume. Sordid sins, sins of a 
manifest selfishness, will have little or no seductive power, 
nay, will rather repel than attract him. The temptation 
may be a messenger of Satan’s, but it must in some sort 
know how to transform itself into an angel of light, before 
it can obtain a hearing from him, or at all events before 
it can mightily allure. And if this be true of men in 
whom is any nobleness of nature, how much more must 
it have been true in respect of Him who was the noblest 
of all. 

At the same time, when we are seeking to measure 
what was the dynamic force of this third temptation, we 
must not leave out of account, as an element herein, that 
in this offer lay the prospect of evading and overleaping 
all the toil and pain and suffering, to which otherwise a 
Saviour of the world was bound in. The kingdoms of 
the world should be his, as an easy gift; instead of being, 
as otherwise they must be, a painful prey wrung at the 
cost of his own life’s blood from the usurper. It is from 
this point of view, and from vividly realizing to ourselves 
the mighty temptation which the prospect of thus escaping 


the cross, and not drinking the cup, must have had for 
E 


ξο THE TEMPTATION. 


Him who knew all which that cross and that cup meant, 
that we must explain that ‘Get thee behind me, 
Satan’ (Matt. xvi. 23), with which at a later day Christ 
rebukes the chief of his apostles, when he too must needs 
play the Hinderer, and with his ‘That be far from 
Thee’ (ver. 22), would fain persuade his Lord that the 
suffering of many things was not, and need not be, his 
portion; that there was another way besides that by the 
steps of his cross whereby He might ascend to his throne. 
The saying has perplexed many. Could He who spoke 
no random word, for whom Satan was the personal em- 
bodiment of all evil, have called by this name a servant 
of his own, visited a passing fault of his with so terrible 
a rebuke? They have recoiled from admitting this; and 
yet how escape the admission? In this way, I believe. 
Christ saw with the lightning glance of his spirit in the 
words of St. Peter a suggestion not so much of his as of 
Satan’s; who was using the servant, and making him the 
organ and unconscious instrument by which he brought 
to bear his engines of temptation against the Master. 
Christ beheld Satan, so to speak, lurking behind Peter, 
suggesting by him, as he had in the wilderness suggested 
more directly, that there was a shorter way to the 
kingdom of his glory than by the cross of his shame; and 
to him the words are properly and primarily addressed ; 
although in reaching him enough glances off from them 
to constitute a wholesome and most real rebuke for Peter. 
The words of rebuke which are spoken then are precisely 
the same as those spoken now, to mark that the Lord recog- 
nized in the remonstrance of Peter the recurrence of a temp- 
tation, whose strength He had known before, and no doubt 
still knew; but which He had already met and overcome. 


THE TEMPTATION. 51 


But the price to be paid for that, power of prodigally 
blessing others, in which after all lay the main stress 
of this temptation, what was that to be? It was no more 
than an act of homage to him from whom He should 
receive the investiture of the kingdom. This price before 
now men not altogether mean or base, men not altogether 
without noble aspirations for the good of their fellow 
men, have consented to pay; having persuaded them- 
selves that a righteous end justified the unrighteous means, 
that the power ill-gotten might yet be so well used as to 
cause the fraud, or violence, or other wrong by which it 
was obtained to be forgotten altogether. Some among 
those who ended with being the very worst and wickedest 
in the French Revolution, saw, no doubt, an ideal kingdom 
floating before their eyes, which they were striving to 
realize, and which they linked with good for many, and 
not merely with some selfish good for themselves. But 
while no other way of bringing about that which they 
desired seemed open to them, they were willing, that so 
they might hasten and make sure the coming of this 
kingdom, to fall down and worship Satan; and what 
hideous service they rendered him at the last is written 
in such characters of blood as will leave their names a 
hissing and an execration for ever. And that act of 
homage which the Tempter now asked of Christ, what 
did itimply? Simply that of Christ He should become 
Antichrist—nothing short of this. Height and depth are 
but two aspects of the same fact ; and just as Lucifer, ‘ son 
of the morning,’ could only fall as he did fall, the height 
to which he was exalted being the measure of the depth 
to which he fell, and, fallen, could not be any other than 


the prince of darkness, so for Him who was tempted now 
E 2 


52 THE TEMPTATION. 


there was no alternative but to be the Christ, or if not 
this, to be Antichrist. No wonder that such a proposal 
should call forth such an answer as it does. 

Hitherto the suggestions of the Wicked One, however 
fraudful, have been capable of a favourable interpretation ; 
the first might have been called forth by sympathy, how- 
ever ill-timed, with the Lord’s hunger ; the second by the 
desire, however premature, that He should openly assert 
the dignity of his person and office, and make manifest to 
all the world his dearness to God. But this is capable of 
no such favourable interpretation. The Tempter has 
shown himself now in his true colours, one who can no 
more be so much as mistaken for an angel of light, but 
manifestly the leader of the great apostasy from the 
worship and service of the true God. Therefore the 
altered tone of the reply: ‘ Get thee behind me, Satan.” 
The divine patience gives room now to the ἴθ indig- 
nation, such as the character of this suggestion required. 
He who simply declines an infamous proposal inade- 
quately satisfies the claims which virtue and honour, 
outraged and insulted in his person, make upon him. 
Indignation in such a case is not merely justifiable, but 
is required, is of the essence of a true righteousness. Such 
an indignation speaks out in this reply of Christ. 

And now He proceeds to justify the word of defiance 
to the outrance with which He has replied, even as with 


1 Ὕπαγε ὀπίσω μου (cf. 2 Kin, ix. 18, ἐπίστρεφε πρὸς τὸ ὀπίσω pov), rendered 
by Tyndale ‘ Avoid, Satan,’ by the Rhemish, * Avaunt, Satan,’ is strangely 
enough rendtred in our Version in two different ways, ‘Get thee hence, Satan,’ 
in Matthew ; ‘Get thee behind Me, Satan,’ in Luke. The words belong properly 
only to the earlier, having been brought by transcribers to the later, Gospel, 
from the text of which they are now omitted in the best critical editions. 


THE TEMPTATION. 53 


such only He could reply, to the last proposal of the 
Tempter ; to justify to the fearful name of ‘Satan,’ adver- 
sary, opposer of all good, which He has given him. 
This He does from a word from the Scripture, to act in 
direct disobedience to which that adversary would fain 
have induced Him: ‘for τέ ¢s written, Thou shalt worship 
the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve’— 
‘written’ at Deut. vi. 13, and again at x. 20; cf. Rev. 
xix. 10. Out of the mouth of the Son of God there 
might have proceeded a two-edged sword of his own 
(Rey. i. 16); but ‘the sword of the Spirit’ which he 
prefers to wield is again the written word ; even as armed 
with this He comes victoriously forth from his third and 
last encounter with the foe. ‘Thou hast magnified thy 
word above all thy name’ (Ps. cxxxvili. 2). ‘ Blessed is 
he,’ exclaims Bishop Andrews here, ‘that has his quiver 
full of such arrows.’ 


‘Then the devil leaveth Him, or, in the far more 
noticeable words of St. Luke, marking two important 
points which St. Matthew had passed over, ‘And when 
the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from 
fim for a season. We observe first the words, ‘ αἱ the 
temptation, which we shall scarcely press too far, if we 
infer from them that the three temptations just recorded, 
with which our great Forerunner was assailed, embrace 
the whole circle of human temptation, so that we have 
here the evidence, to use Jackson’s words, of ‘ Christ’s 
mastery over Satan at his three principal weapons.’ These 
‘three principal weapons’ we are wont to express under 
the three terms, the world, the flesh, and the devil; 
answering, as has often been observed, to the three 


54 THE TEMPTATION. 


enumerated by St. John, ‘the lust of the flesh, the lust 
of the eyes, and the pride of life’ (1 John ii. 16). In 
the suggested gratification of the appetite, contrary to the 
will of God, was the temptation of the flesh; in the 
proffered kingdoms with their glory, the temptation of 
the world ; while, although all the. temptations were from 
the devil, yet that was especially the devilish temptation 
which said to Him that in vain-glory and spiritual pride 
He should cast Himself headlong from the pinnacle of the 
temple ; another ‘son of the morning’ (cf. Isai. xiv. 12), 
but falling from a far higher height than any from which 
ever his Tempter fell. 

Nor should we fail further to observe the very note- 
worthy parallelism between this Temptation which Christ 
surmounted in the desert and that other under which our 
first parents succumbed inthe garden. ‘ When the woman 
saw’ (‘through false spectacles of Satan’s making,’ as 
Jackson adds) ‘that the tree was good for food’ (the 
solicitation of the flesh), ‘and that it was pleasant to the 
eyes (the solicitation of the world),‘and a tree to be desired 
to make one wise’ (the solicitation of the devil), ‘she took 
of the fruit thereof and did eat’ (Gen. iii. 6). In that 
first sin were the lineaments of every other sin, as in this 
victory over temptation the lineaments, and very much 
more than the lineaments, of every other victory.” 


* Augustine (in loc.): Tria sunt ista, et nihil invenies unde tentatur 
cupiditas humana nisi aut desiderio carnis, aut desiderio oculorum, aut 
ambitione swculi. Per ista tria tentatus est Dominus a diabolo. Of. De 
Verd Relig. 38. 

? See on this matter Gregory the Great, Hom. xvi. 2, 3; Aquinas (Swm. 
Theol. 3%, qu. 41, art. 4): Non dixisset Scriptura quod consummaté omni 
tentatione diabolus recessit ab illo, nisi in tribus premissis esset omnium 
materia delictorum ; quia cause tentationum cause sunt cupiditatum, scilicet 
carnis oblectatio, spes gloria, et aviditas potenti. Oompare Jackson, Zrea- 
tise of the Divine Essence and Attributes, vu. ii, 10 


_ THE TEMPTATION. 55 


Having thus ‘ ended all the temptation,” launched every 
one of his fiery darts, and seen them every one fall 
quenched and blunted to the ground, ‘the devil leaveth 
Him; for that word shall first be shewn true on the 
Prince of the faithful, to which each one of his people 
shall set afterwards his seal, ‘ Resist the devil, and he will 
sflee from you’ (Jam. iv. 7). He ‘leaveth Him, but as 
St. Luke is careful to add, ‘for a season.’ Room is left in 
these words for a later assault, and it is in fact implied in 
them that such a later assault was in reserve and should 
in due time arrive. Nor can we be in any doubt in re- 
gard of the period to which the sacred historian looks on ; 
that, as one great Temptation signalized the opening of the 
Saviour’s ministry, so another should signalize its close, 
the Temptation in the wilderness being followed in due 
time and completed by the Temptation in the garden ; 
even as the Lord Himself, whether looking backward or 
not, yet certainly looking forward to that second Tempta- 
tion, when now it was close at hand, exclaimed, ‘ The 
prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me’ 
(John xiv. 30); nothing, that is, on which he could lay 
his finger, and claim it for his own. 

The two wrestlings with the Evil One differed indeed 
from one another, and so may be contrasted with one 
another. Their difference consisted mainly in this, that 
whereas in the first he brought to bear against the Lord 
all things pleasant and flattering, if so he might by aid of 
these entice or seduce Him from his obedience, in the 
second he thought with other engines to overcome his 
constancy, tried Him with all painful things, as before with 


* Completé omni tentatione ilecebrosd, is Augustine’s significant limitation 
of these words (De Trin. iv. 13). 


56 THE TEMPTATION. © 


all pleasurable, hoping to terrify, if it might be, from 
his allegiance to the truth, Him whom manifestly he 
could not allure. In Augustine’s words, having tried 
the door of desire, and found that closed, he tried after- 
wards, and with the same unsuccessful issues, the door of 
fear ; the second Temptation of the garden dividing itself, 
like that of the wilderness, into three acts following close# 
on one another (Matt. xxvi. 44). And the same illustrious 
teacher goes on to urge that as it was with the Captain 
of our salvation, so also it must be with every one of those 
who fight under his banner. They too shall need to 
tread under foot both the lion and the adder, to resist, 
that is, now a threatening, now a flattering, world. In- 
deed, it was with the very purpose of teaching them how 
they should do all this, that He Himself also suffered 
being tempted.t| Jeremy Taylor adds another reason 
why for our sakes our blessed Lord should have accom- 
plished all the temptation; namely, that keeping this in 
remembrance, none hereafter, because they were greatly 
tempted, should therefore misdoubt of the divine love. 
‘The holy Spirit did drive Jesus into the wilderness to be 
tempted by the devil. And though we are bound to pray 
instantly that we fall into no temptation, yet if, by divine 
permission, or by an inspiration of the holy Spirit, we be 
engaged in an action or course of life that is full of 
temptation and empty of comfort; let us apprehend it as 
an issue of divine providence, as an occasion of the 
rewards of diligence and patience, as an instrument of 
virtue, as a designation “οὐ that way in which we must 
glorify God; but no argument of disfavour, since our 


* Augustine (Serm. cxxii. 2): Ad hoc enim pugnat Imperator, ut milites 
discant, 


THE TEMPTATION. 57 


dearest Lord, the most holy Jesus, who could have driven 
the devil away by the breath of his mouth, yet was by 
the Spirit of his Father permitted to a trial and molesta- 
tion by the spirit of darkness.” 


‘And behold, angels came and ministered unto Him’— 
that is, to the Son of man, to the second Adam; even as 
in Jewish legend they are said to have danced before the 
first Adam on the day of his creation.” It could not 
indeed be said that they were here fulfilling that office 
which in the Epistle to the Hebrews is ascribed to them, 
as ‘ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who 
shall be heirs of salvation’ (i. 14); for here was not one 
of these ‘ heirs of salvation,’ but the very Author of this 
salvation to all others. We have in like manner an 
angel appearing to Him and strengthening Him in another 
great hour of his temptation (Luke xxii. 43). It is pro- 
bable that on this occasion they brought food (cf. 1 Kin. 
xix. 5); the word of the original (διγχκονοῦν.) may imply 
as much; and that word, ‘ Man did eat angels’ food’ (Ps. 
Ixxviil. 25), may have thus received its highest fulfilment; 
nor less may they have celebrated with songs of triumph 
this transcendant victory of the kingdom of light over the 
kingdom of darkness. So much the Christian poet of our 
age has suggested : 
‘Nor less your lay of triumph greeted fair 
Our Champion and your King, 


In that first strife whence Satan in despair 
Sank down on scathéd wing ; 


1 Life of Christ, part 1, sect. 9, ὃ 7. 
* See Eisenmenger, Hntdeckt. Judenth., vol. ii. p. 17. The Mahometans 
have borrowed this legend from the Jews. 


58 THE TEMPTATION. 


Alone He fasted, and alone He fought; 
But when his toils were o’er, 

Ye to the sacred Hermit duteous brought 
Banquet and hymn, your Eden’s festal store.’ 


A few words in conclusion. It is nothing wonderful 
that the endeavours should have been many, to explain 
away the Temptation, to exhaust it of its supernatural 
element, and so to reduce it to the level of an occurrence 
explicable by the laws habitually at work around us and 
within us. Now, if our Lord’s life had been itself such 
an occurrence, it would be certainly perplexing to find a 
fragment of wonder such as this is, intruding into the 
midst of that life; nor would the instinct be unnatural, 
which, as it every where desires moral harmony and 
keeping, should endeavour in some way or another to get 
rid of an event, out of all such harmony and keeping with 
the other events of that life. But if the manifestation of 
the Son of God in the flesh be itself the wonder of all 
wonders, then that this should be surrounded by a group 
of secondary wonders, that there should be nothing 
common in his life, or, to speak more accurately, very 
much altogether uncommon, this might have been ex- 
pected beforehand. What would indeed be startling and 
perplexing would be the absence of every thing super- 
natural from such a life—the fact that He whose name is 
Wonderful (Isai. ix. 6) should have fallen at once into 
the common course and order of things, and never either 
by what He did, or what was done in respect of Him, 
have testified that there was any difference between Him- 
self and the other children of men. Those, however, who 
will not be satisfied until the light which falls upon the 
earthly path of our Lord, and lights it up with a glory not 


THE TEMPTATION. 59 


of earth, has for them faded into the light of common day, 
have been very busy with this history; and that for a 
long time past; for it is quite a mistake to suppose that 
the attempts to explain away the Temptation into a 
dream, or a vision, or a parable, or an inner conflict, or 
an encounter with a tempter of flesh and blood, into any 
thing in short but that which on its face it announces 
itself to be, are of very recent origin, and belong exclu- 
sively to the neology of later years. It is abundantly 
evident that the Scriptural theologians of the seventeenth 
and beginning of the eighteenth century had earnestly 
to resist attempts which in their time also were rife, to 
reduce the Temptation to an every day occurrence.” 
Thus for some the Temptation is a vision. The 
explanation is untenable. It is manifest that the sacred 
historians did not mean to relate this event as a vision. 
When they have to tell of such, they make quite clear 
what they intend (Acts ix. 12; xX. 3, 10; Xl. §; XVill.Q; 
Xxii. 17) ; and, which goes still more directly to the root 
of the matter, no one can accept this explanation without 
implicitly renouncing the Church’s faith concerning her 
Saviour and her Head. Christ had no visions; it lay in 
the necessity of his divine nature that He should have 
none. There was never a door opened in heaven (Rev. 
iv. 1) for Him, before whom the heavenly world lay 
always manifest and bare (John v. 19, 20). He could 
not be at one time or another ‘in the Spirit’ (Rev. i. 10), 
who was always in the Spirit; the higher spiritual world 
being no strange element, into which He was rapt at 


* It needs only to refer in proof to Wolf, Cure Philol. vol. i. p. 66, and 
the many treatises which he enumerates there, from whose titles it is plain 
that in his time the matter was in eager debate. 


60 THE TEMPTATION. 


intervals (2 Cor. xii. 21), but his permanent abiding place. 
He had no special communications or revelations from 
his Father, inasmuch as his whole life was one of entire 
and unbroken intercommunion with Him (John v. 17, 
19). Even those which might appear such special com- 
munications directed to Himself, are carefully explained 
to have another motive and reason: ‘ This voice came 
not because of Me, but for your sakes’ (John xii. 30; 
cf. xi. 41, 42). Massillon speaks very grandly in words 
quoted below (they are found in a sermon On the Divinity 
of our Lord), on this absence of all rapture on the part 
of the Son of God; shows that it was a necessary conse- 
quence of his Divinity that He should never at any 
moment of his life be borne out of Himself, as were the 
prophets of the Old, and, though more rarely, the apostles 
and others of the New, Dispensation (Acts x. 10; xi. 5; 
Kxil. 17; 2 Cor. xii.2,4; Rev.i.10).’ The idea alike of 
the vision and of the trance or ecstasy is that of a depres- 
sion or partial suspension of the actings of the lower life, 
so to prepare for a better reception of impressions or 
communications from a higher world; the setting of the 
garish sun of this world, that the pure stars of a heavenly 


? Nos prophétes eux-mémes annongant les choses futures, sans perdre 
lusage de la raison, ni sortir dela gravité et de la décence de leur ministére, 
entraient dans un enthousiasme divin; il fallait souvent que le son d’une 
lyre reveillit en eux l’esprit prophétique : on sentait bien qu’une impulsion 
étrangére les animait, et que ce n’était pas de leur propre fonds qu’ils tiraient 
la science de l’avenir, et les mystéres cachés qu’ils annoncaient aux hommes. 
Jésus-Christ prophétise comme il parle; la science de l’avenir n’a rien qui 
le frappe, qui le trouble, qui le surprenne, parcequ’il renferme tous les temps 
dans son esprit; les mystéres futurs qu’il annonce, ne sont point dans son 
Ame des lumieres soudaines et infuses qui l’eblouissent; ce sont des objets 
familiers qu’il ne perd jamais de vue, et dont il trouve les images au-dedans 
de lui; et tous les siécles ἃ venir sont sous l’immensité de ses regards 
comme le jour présent qui nous éclaire. 


THE TEMPTATION. 61 


firmament may appear.’ But in Christ this could have 
been never needed; in whom existed at all times a per- 
fect balance and harmony of all faculties and powers; in 
whom there was no predominance of the lower, which 
could at any instant obscure or stand in the way of the 
perfect actings of the higher. 

The same objection, only in a greater degree, forbids 
an explaining of the Temptation as a dream, which, in- 
deed, is only a subordinate kind of vision ; namely that it 
is impossible to reconcile it with the idea of the Son of 
God. Even servants of God, who have made any con- 
siderable advances in the spiritual life, are seldom com- 
municated with in this manner. Rather the dream is the 
channel of communication with the heathen, with an 
Abimelech (Gen. xx. 3), a Laban (Gen. xxxi. 24), a Nebu- 
chadnezzar (Dan. ii. 1; iv. 5),a Pilate’s wife (Matt. xxvii. 
19), with the wise men from the East (Matt. ii. 12) ; or 
with others who, standing higher than these, yet in the 
measure of their spiritual attainments fall very far below 
the more eminent saints of God, a Solomon for instance 
Gi Kin. iii. 5) ; and it is expressly brought out as part of 
the dignity of Moses, that while God spoke, and made 
Himself known, to other and inferior prophets by visions 
or dreams, He spoke mouth to mouth with him (Num. 
xil. 5-8; Deut. xxxiv. 10). How much more then would 
there belong to the Son of God at every moment the 
perfect clearness of waking vision. Indeed all mental 


* Augustine (De Div. Quest. ii. qu. 1) defines an ecstasy, Mentis 
alienatio a sensibus corporis, ut spiritus hominis divino Spiritu assumptus 
capiendis atque intuendis imaginibus vacet. 

* See J. Smith, Select Discourses, pp. 169, 254, for an interesting account, 
bearing on this very matter, of what the Jewish Doctors called the gradus 
Mosaicus of prophecy, and its superiority over all other. 


62 THE TEMPTATION. 


illusions of every kind were so far from Him that I must 
needs esteem it a mistake when in Paradise Regained 
Milton makes Him to dream of feasts in his hunger in 
the wilderness. 

Another attempt to empty the Temptation of its mys- 
terious element was made in the seventeenth century, 
and taken up in the beginning of our own by Paulus 
and by others. They saw in the Tempter here a 
mortal man, an emissary from the Sanhedrim, or pos- 
sibly the High Priest himself, who would fain try of what 
metal this youthful prophet from Galilee, to whom the 
Baptist had just borne such glorious witness, was made, 
and whether he might not be seduced and bribed into the 
service of the old corrupt theocracy ; instead of witnessing 
against it and its ministers, as the examples of the earlier 
prophets and many perilous indications in the Baptist’s 
career, made too probable would be the course He would 
take. This cannot need more than to be stated and left. 
Unbelief has its cast-off garments, of which even itself is 
now ashamed, and this is of them. 

The suggestion of others that the Temptation was a 
conflict on our Lord’s part with no outward but an in- 
ward foe, with the solicitations of appetite, of ambition, of 
worldliness, which, born in his own mind, sought to draw 
Him away from the narrow and painful path appointed 
for his treading, is equally untenable, and this for reasons 
which have been stated already ; namely that it is directly 
contrary to the idea of a Saviour, who as such must be 
a Holy One, and this absolutely and completely, that 
thoughts soliciting to evil should have thus spontaneously 


See Spanheim, Dud. Lvang. 51. 


THE TEMPTATION. 63 


risen up within Him. Christ could be tempted only 
from without; not from within.’ Coming as He did, not 
in this sinful flesh of ours, to which evil is native, and 
in which it inevitably rises up, but coming, as the apostle 
expressly tells us, ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Rom. 
viii. 3), where the ‘likeness’ is plainly introduced to 
qualify the ‘sinful,’ for with the flesh itself He had not 
likeness, but identity (1 John iv. 2; John i. 14), evil could 
in no other way be present to Him.’ 

One more proposed explanation will complete the list. 
All the foregoing ones, if they are not really reconcil- 
able with the sacred narrative, are yet presented by their 
advocates as being so. They have none of them avowedly 
cast off allegiance to the Word of God, as that within the 
limits of which they must move, and by which they must 
submit to be tried. But there are who withdraw from 
this narrative all real historic foundation whatever, who 
see only a mythus here ; that is, who see in this victorious 
encounter of the Prince of Light with the prince of dark- 
ness a portion of that fabulous halo of glory with which 
the infant Church encircled the head of its Founder; not 
thereby meaning to deceive; but unconsciously giving an 
outward shape and subsistance to the hopes, yearnings, 
expectations, and desires, which filled its heart as to what 

1 There is an essay by Gelbricht (I have never seen it), An male de animo 
Jesu sentiendum sit si ὁ πειράζων ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ Christus ipse, i. 6. mentis ipsius 
cogitata fuerint ? Alteb.1815. How the writer answers the question which 
he thus puts I do not know. How he ought to have answered it, there can 
be no doubt. Ullmann (Siindlosigheit Jesu, 5th edit., p. 116 sqq.) answers it 
in the negative, does his best to show that the absolute sinlessness of the 
Saviour is not brought into question by the admitting of such an explana- 
tion of the Temptation, but in this fails altogether. 

2 Augustine (Serm. clxxxiii. 8) Misit Deus Filium suum non in simili- 


tudinem carnis, quasi caro non esset caro, sed in similitudinem carnis peccati, 
quia caro erat, sed peccati caro non erat. 


64 THE TEMPTATION. 


the Messiah ought to be, and therefore what He must have 
actually been. Strauss' ingeniously gathers up the Old 
Testament preparations for the growth of such a mythus 
as this, the rudiments of it which we may trace there; as 
that Moses and Elijah had both fasted their forty days ; 
that Israel, the collective son of God, as Christ was the 
personal Son, had been tempted forty years in the wilder- 
ness, with much more of the same kind.” This must stand 
or fall with the whole mythical scheme of the Gospel; 
and it would be lost labour to undertake its refutation 
here. Only I will observe that the nearest real parallel 
to our Lord’s Temptation which the Old Testament 
actually offers, he has not referred to. It is furnished 
by the history of Solomon (1 Kin. iii. 5-15). The resem- 
blance, indeed, is only a remote one; yet assuredly it was 
a temptation, when the Lord, appearing to the youthful 
king, and offering to him what he would, gave him the 
opportunity of choosing riches or long life in place of the 
heavenly wisdom, if so he had been inclined, At the 
same time in his case, as one comparatively weak in all 
the actings of the spiritual life, the temptation came from 
God and not from Satan, and did not therefore concen- 
trate in itself the whole power of temptation. 

The mythic parallel which meets us in heathendom, 
although wanting an historic basis, and thus only painted 
as upon a cloud, is much nearer—that, I mean, of 
Hercules, when at the beginning of his course he beheld 
before him the two ways, of pleasure, and of toil, and 
was severally solicited to walk in the one and in the other. 
And the parallel will be felt to be closer, if only we will 


1 Leben Jesu, 1837, vol. i. p. 471 864. 
5 Compare Gfrérer, Das Jahrhundert des Heils, vol. ii. p. 379-387. 


THE TEMPTATION. 65 


keep in mind that heroic character of his life and work, 
which many of the later legends about him have done 
so much to obscure, substituting mere strength and 
animal good-nature in its room. It was not thus that he 
was conceived at the first; but rather as the man who in 
a noble devotedness to his fellows girded himself up to 
undergo all labours and to affront all dangers for their 
sakes. Buttmann in his interesting essay upon Herakles' 
seeks to prove that this ‘ Temptation of Hercules’ is not a 
later addition to the legend, which we owe to the sophist 
Prodicus, but lay in the heart, and belonged to the original 
stuff, of the mythus. And since it is certain that any man 
who has ever wrought, or who is conceived as having 
wrought, anything deserving of memory for his fellow- 
men, could only have effected this by such a noble post- 
ponement of pleasure to duty, and that this postponement, 
which acted itself perfectly out in the Son of God, must, 
though in weaker forms, act itself out anew in every 
champion of the truth, and can scarcely help coming to a 
head at some turning point of his life, there is nothing 
improbable in this supposition. 


*In the Mythologus, vol. i. p. 246; compare Pauly, Real-Encyclopddie, 
vol, 111. p. 1180, 


66 THE CALLING OF 


2. THE CALLING OF PHILIP AND 
NATHANAEL. 


John i. 43-51. 


We are told of Saul, that when ‘he saw any strong 
man, he took him unto him’ (1 Sam. xiv. 22); and as 
we read the catalogue of David’s worthies (2 Sam. xxiii. 
8-39), we may well believe that he in no other manner 
filled the ranks of his host. And as these the ancient 
kings, as Saul and as David, so too the Son of David, the 
true King of Israel, wherever He saw any man ‘fit for 
the kingdom of God,’ He claimed him for his own, ‘ took 
him unto Him.’ This He did not by any exercise of out- 
ward power, but by those secret attractions which draw 
the brave to a braver, the noble to one noblest of all. 
In this first burst of his ministry, his triumphs in this 
kind rapidly succeed one another. ‘ The day following,’ 
following, that is, the day on which He enlisted three of 
the foremost among his future disciples, He makes two 
more his own; these also great ones, even though they 
may not attain to the first three. On this day ‘ He would 
go forth into Galilee; the words imply that He was 
about to undertake the journey thither, but had not 
actually begun it; ‘and jindeth Philip. The fact that 
Philip, though born a Jew, for he should be one of the 
twelve apostles of the Lamb, thus bears a Greek name, 
and he is not the only apostle who does so, is a remark- 


PHILIP AND NATHANAEL. 67 


able illustration of the extent to which Galilee (‘ Galilee 
of the Gentiles’), had been hellenized, penetrated through 
and through with the customs and language of Greece. 
It is well worthy of note how often this finding recurs in 
this chapter; Christ finding disciples as here; disciples 
jinding each his friend, as at ver. 41, 45; and reporting 
how they have at once been found by, and have them- 
selves found, the Messiah (ibid.). It is the chapter οὖ. 
the Eurekas. 

Thus finding Philip, He ‘sath unto him, Follow Me.’ 
This ‘ Follow Me’ might seem at first sight no more than 
an invitation to accompany Him on that journey from 
the banks of Jordan to Galilee, on which He was just 
setting forward. It meant this (thus compare Matt. ix. 9; 
Luke v. 27); but at the same time how much more. It 
was an invitation to follow the blessed steps of his most 
holy life (Matt. xvi. 24; John viii. 12; xii. 26; xxi. 19; 
Rey. xiv. 4), to be a partaker at once of his cross and his 
crown. How much of this Philip may have understood 
at the moment it is impossible to say ; but whether much 
or little, he is not disobedient to the heavenly calling. 
No doubt he had been more or less prepared for it by 
some accounts which he had obtained from his fellow- 
townsmen Andrew and Peter, of what had passed between 
them and the Lord on the day preceding. As much is 
intimated by the Evangelist in his mention exactly at this 
point of his narrative, that ‘Philip was of Bethsaida, the 
city of Andrew and Peter, a fact which at once ac- 
counted for the acquaintance into which he had been 
brought with all which had passed between them and the 
Lord. 

But Philip, being himself thus ‘masterfast —if it be 


F 2 


68 THE CALLING OF 


permitted to revive a word which with others of a similar 
termination, as ‘rootfast,’ ‘shamefast,’ ‘bedfast,’ did useful 
service in the language once'—cannot be content till he 
has introduced his friend into the glorious liberty of the 
same service with himself, until he has done what in him 
lies to make his friend a sharer of his treasure and his 
joy. It could not be otherwise; for if in one sense this 
treasure of the kingdom of heaven is one, ‘ which when 
a man hath found, he hideth’ (Matt. xiii. 44), in another 
sense it is one which will not let him rest till he has made 
others partakers of the same. ‘Philip findeth Nathanael,’ 
and saith unto him, We have found Hin of whom Moses 
in the Law and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, 
the son of Joseph. There is error and imperfection still 
cleaving to his own knowledge. In all likelihood Naza- 
reth was at this time for him the birthplace of the Lord 
—not an unimportant error, though slight as compared 
to that which ‘son of Joseph’ would have involved, had 
he held fast to it after better teaching, had it belonged to 
any other than the rudimentary period of his faith. 

Strangely enough De Wette and others have argued 
from these words, thus faithfully recording the first im- 
pressions of Philip, his imperfect theology, and the extent 
to which partial error was mingling still with the truth 
which he had learned, not that he at this time, but that 
St. John when he composed his Gospel, either knew 
nothing of the birth at Bethlehem and the miraculous 
Conception, or gave no credit to them. The fact is that 

1 It appears in Skelton, The Paston Letters, and elsewhere. 

* The name, which corresponds to our Theodore (Gift of God), occurs in 
the Old Testament. A Nethaneel is prince of the tribe of Issachar (Num. 


i. 8); one too of David’s elder brothers bears this name (a1 Chron. il. 14); 
and eight other Nethaneels are mentioned there. 


PHILIP AND NATHANAEL. 69 


St. John, as a truthful narrator, records not what Philip, 
if at that time he had been better instructed, ought to 
have said, but what in that twilight of his knowledge he 
actually did say ; even as it is not in the least wonderful 
that in one brief interview he had not become acquainted 
with the most secret and mysterious events in the life of 
his future Lord ; events of which even apostles themselves 
only obtained gradual glimpses, as they were able to bear 
them. The partial error which clave to Philip’s faith did 
not hinder him from grasping that central truth which 
in good time would detach from itself whatever, not of 
its own nature, was cleaving to it. He is sure that this 
whom they have found is He ‘ of whom Moses in the Law’ 
(see Gen. ili. 15; xlix. 10; Num. xxiv. 17, 19; Deut. 
XVill. 15-19) ‘and the prophets’ (see 2 Sam. vii. 12-16; 
2 Sam. xxiii. 1-7; Isai. vii. 14; ix.6; liii.; Ezek. xxxiv. 
23-31) ‘did write.’ 

One weak point in Philip’s statement, one apparent 
flaw in the credentials of the Messiah whom he announces, 
Nathanael detects at once; for indeed his objection, ‘ Can 
there any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ contains 
more than a reference to the general low esteem arid 
disrepute in which Nazareth was held (Matt. 11. 23), the 
unlikelihood therefore that aught preeminently good 
would come forth from it. The difficulty which he feels, 
and which in consistency with his guileless character he 
at once expresses, is the same as theirs who somewhat 
later objected, ‘Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath 
not the Scripture said that Christ cometh out of the town 
of Bethlehem, where David was?’ (John vii. 41, 42; cf. 
ver. 52); the difference between him and those other 
gainsayers being, that he gladly dismisses his difficulty 


70 THE CALLING OF 


yearning as he does to believe ; while they gladly cling 
and hold fast to theirs, exempting them, as it seems to do, 
from the unwelcome necessity of believing. This ‘ good 
thing, which Nathanael is persuaded that Nazareth cannot 
yield, must be understood as that one ‘ good thing,’ that 
‘ oift of God’ (John iv. 10), in which all other good things 
are included; and is a distinct reference on the part of 
one not probably unversed in the prophecies which 
went before of Christ, to the clear fore-announcing in 
them that Messiah’s going forth in time should not be 
from Galilee, therefore not from Nazareth, but from 
Bethlehem in Judzea (Mic. v. 2). 

Philip’s ‘ Come and see, which is all the reply he makes 
to the objection of his friend, is manifestly an echo of 
Christ’s ‘Come and see’ of the day preceding (ver. 39). 
That immediate personal intercourse which had proved 
so effectual in the case of Andrew and another (Philip, as 
has been noted already, had no doubt heard from his 
fellow-townsmen how they had been won for the truth), 
shall not prove less effectual in the case of Nathanael. It 
was a Wise answer then, and is often a wise one now. 
The highest heavenly things are in their nature incapable 
of being uttered in words, and ‘ Come and see, come and 
make proof of them,’ is sometimes the only true reply to 
difficulties about them, an indication of the only effectual 
way by which those difficulties shall be removed. There 
are truths in the heavenly world which, like the sun in 
the natural world, can only be seen by their own light ; 
which in no other way will be seen at all. Philip has a 
confidence which the result abundantly justified, that in 
that holy presence, if only he could bring his friend 
within the range of its influence, all preconceived objec- 


PHILIP AND NATHANAEL. γι 


tions would dissolve and disappear. Perplexities might 
still remain, but he would be content to adjourn the 
solution of them to a later day, which indeed is what faith 
is summoned to do evermore. 

He who ‘knoweth the proud afar off, his eyes are also 
on the faithful of the land that they may dwell with Him’ 
(Ps. ci. 6); and in Nathanael He recognizes at once one 
of these. Him therefore He prevents with that word of 
highest praise, saying, not ¢o him, but yet of him, and 
intending that he should hear, ‘ Behold an Israelite indeed, 
in whom is no guile’ ‘An Israelite indeed, Nathanael 
pertained not only to that Israel after the flesh of which 
St. Paul speaks (1 Cor. x. 18), but to the ‘ Israel of God’ 
(Gal. vi. 16), which the apostle is so careful to distinguish 
from it ; a Jew not outwardly, but inwardly (Rom. ii. 28, 29; 
ix. 6; Phil. iii. 3); in whom this name of highest honour 
was not merely a name, or worse than this, a contradic- 
tion of all which he truly was (Rev. ili. 9); but who ful- 
filled in his innermost life all whereof that name was the 
promise and the pledge. ‘ Israelite’ was the title which 
on many accounts the Jew was best pleased to bear. 
There were others who were Abraham’s seed as well as 
he; the Ishmaelite and the Edomite; but ‘ Zsraelite’ was a 
title exclusively his own. And then too it was the theo- 
cratic title (Acts ii. 22; 11.12; v.34; xiii.16; Rom. ix. 4; 
Xi. 1; 2 Cor. xi. 22); a record of the glorious achievements 
of their forefather Jacob; a name which he had won from 
God Himself, when by faith and prayer he had prevailed 
even with Him (Gen. xxxii. 28). He who knew what 
was in man declares of Nathanael that he is a true 
descendant of this Israel; not of Jacob merely ; for in 
Jacob, the supplanter, there was guile: it was indeed the 


72 THE CALLING OF 


most marked fault and failing of his character (Gen. xxvii.; 
XXX. 37-43; Xxxi. 20), until that character had been 
ennobled and elevated by a divine discipline, till he had 
struggled out of Jacob into Israel (Gen. xxxii. 24-32; 
Hos. xii. 4). 

At the same time this absence of guile which Christ 
imputes to Nathanael must not be pressed too far. This 
guileless nature is as the kindly soil in which all excellent 
graces will flourish (Luke iii. 21; vill.15; x.6); but does 
not do away with the necessity of the divine seed, out of 
which alone they can spring. He who is ‘ without guile’ 
is not therefore without sin; this, at least, could only be 
asserted of One (1 Pet. ii. 2); but rather he is one who 
seeks no cloke for his sin; does not excuse, palliate, hide, 
diminish, or deny it. Being a sinner, he confesses it, and 
thus finds pardon for the sin which he confesses. So 
David had declared long ago (Ps. xxxii. 1, 2); to whose 
words Christ is probably here distinctly referring.’ 

Some have enquired, How did the Lord know of Na- 
thanael that he was this true Israelite which He here 
avouches him to be? Was it from any previous familiar- 
ity? It may have been so in part. He who knew what 
instruments He would need for the work which He was 
meditating, may before this have seenin Nathanael, or 
heard about him, what gave Him assurance that there were 
fitnesses in him for a future disciple, perhaps for a future 


1 Augustine (in loc.) has excellent observations: Quid est, in quo dolus 
non est? Forte non habebat peccatum? forte non erat «ger? forte illi 
medicus non erat necessarius? Absit. Nemo hic sic natus est ut illo medico 
nonegeret. . . . Sidolus in isto non erat, sanabilem illum medicus judicavit, 
non sanum;.. . videt istum sanabilem quia dolus in isto non erat. Quo- 
modo dolus in illo non erat? Si peccator est, fatetur se peccatorem esse. 
Si enim peccator est, et justum se dicit, dolus est in ore ipsius. 


Ἁ 


PHILIP AND NATHANAEL. fim: 


apostle, even for one of the twelve foundation stones of 
the Heavenly Jerusalem. Yet there is not the slightest 
necessity for assuming such a previous acquaintance. 
Christ read, as often as He needed to read, not merely 
the present thoughts, but also so much as He desired of 
the past histories, of those who came in contact with Him ; 
and this He did not merely by that natural divination, that 
art of looking through countenances into souls, interpreting 
the inner life from the outward bearing, which all men in 
a greater or less degree possess, and He doubtless in the 
largest measure of all (Isai. xi. 3); but ‘in his spirit’ (Mark 
ii. 8), by the exercise of that divine power, which was 
always mm Him, though not always active in Him. It was 
thus, for example, that He read the life-story of that 
Samaritan woman (John iv. 17, 18; cf. v.14); where it 
is impossible’ to presume a previous acquaintance; it was 
thus far most probably in the instance before us. 

This simplicity or absence of folds, this guilelessness or 
absence of deceit, which the Lord imputes to Nathanael, 
reveals itself in his reply, ‘ Whence knowest Thou me? 
There is no affectation here of declining the praise; no 
seeming to consider it as a compliment which he does not 
rightly deserve ; but only a question of admiration how the 
Lord should have known him so exactly, and declared | 
him so truly. And then in proof that this was no happy 
guess, no random*arrow which, shot at a venture, had yet 
hit the mark, the Lord refers him to some circumstance 
which we do not exactly know, but which Nathanael 
entirely understood: ‘ Before that Philip called thee, when 
thou wast under the figtree, I saw thee’ The mere sitting 
of an Israelite under his figtree was of itself too common 
an occurrence (1 Kin. iv. 25; Mic. iv. 4; Zech. iii. 10) 


74 THE CALLING OF 


to yield such a sign. It is plain that our Lord must here 
refer to some passage, outward or inward, in Nathanael’s 
life, most probably inward and spiritual, some earnest 
prayer, some great mental struggle, the overcoming, it 
may be, of some strong temptation, which under that fig- 
tree had lately found place; immediately, as it would 
seem, before Philip had found him, and invited him to 
Jesus; for that call too the Lord declares to be known to 
Him; known therefore as well, though not imputed, the 
slighting words with which Nathanael at first received 
the invitation. Now however he makes altogether good 
that hasty speech which he uttered then. This word of 
Christ is enough; he feels as the Psalmist, ‘O Lord, 
Thou hast searched me and known me; Thou compassest 
my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all 
my ways’ (Ps. cxxxix. 1, 3); feels that He before whom he 
stands is a searcher of hearts; and at once that full and 
free confession of faith, which only the confessions of Peter 
(Matt. xvi. 16), of Martha (John xi. 27), and of Thomas 
(John xx. 28), all those too at much later periods of Christ’s 
ministry, matched or surpassed, ‘ Rabbi, Thou art the Son 
of God, Thou art the King of Israel, breaks forth from his 
lips. 

A word or two upon each of these ascriptions, being as 
they are, the first an acknowledgment of the dignity of 
@hrist’s person, the second of the greattess of his office." 
And first, ‘ Zhou art the Son of God. We do not here 
suppose for an instant that Nathanael, giving this title to 
the Lord, intended by it all which the Nicene Fathers 
intended, and which we intend, by the same; and yet 


* Bengel: Confessio de persona et officio Christi. 


PHILIP AND NATHANAEL. ης 


nothing less was wrapped up in that title, to be unfolded 
from it in due time. And it meant much, even on Natha- 
nael’s lips, and was no mere language of honour uttered 
at random. How much it meant we may clearly perceive 
from the active opposition, the earnest hostility, which this 
title awoke on the part of the Scribes and Pharisees, as 
often as the Lord implicitly or explicitly claimed it as his 
own (John v. 18; x. 30-39). But however these may 
have denied the superhuman character of Messiah, there 
were enough glimpses of this in the Old Testament to 
explain how as many as had searched more deeply into it, 
or whose vision was less obscured and distorted by pre- 
conceived prejudices, should have recognized in Him one 
who was partaker of the divine nature, and therefore ‘ the 
Son of God.’ It is sufficient to refer to Ps. il. 7, 12; 
Isai. ix. 6. We are then justified in ascribing nothing 
short of such a recognition to Nathanael. 

And the words which follow, ‘ Zhou art the King of 
Israel, words in which the ‘ Israelite’ accepts, owns, and 
does homage to Israel’s king, avouches himself a subject 
of his, amount very nearly to the same thing. He who 
said in that second Psalm, ‘ Kiss the Son lest He be angry’ 
(ver. 12), said also of the same, ‘Yet have I set my King 
upon my holy hill of Zion’ (ver. 6; cf. Zeph. iii. 15; Isai. 
ix. 7; Jer. xxiil. 5,6). In all these passages the identity 
of Israel’s King and Israel’s God is plainly involved; and 
the same looks plainly out from many other prophecies 
concerning the Messiah, as eminently from the 72nd Psalm. 


1 Lampe: Et quia testimonium quod Jesus ei tanquam vero Israélite 
exhibuerat, conscientidé bond fretus admiserat, hine sigillatim suum nomen 
inter subditos hujus regni profitetur, ac Jesu tanquam suo legitimo Regi in 
obsequium se addicit. 


76 THE CALLING OF 


But to him that hath shall be given. He who hears 
and believes shall one day walk not by faith, but by sight. 
Thus shall it fare with Nathanael. ‘Jesus answered and 
said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under 
the figtree, believest thou? Thow shalt see greater things 
than these. And He saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say 
unto you, Hereafter shall ye see heaven open, and the angels 
of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.* 
This ‘ Verily, verily, this double amen, which here occurs 
for the first time, is peculiar to St. John; he only records 
our Lord’s use of it, but he on very many occasions. It 
comes most fitly from the lips of Him, who is Himself the 


1 This is the first occasion in the recorded Evangelical history upon which 
our Lord used and applied to Himself the name of ‘Son of man.’ Bengel’s 
note on this phrase is a wonderful specimen of the close packing of matter 
the most interesting and the most important in his Gnomon. There are 
materials in this note which it would not be very difficult to expand into a 
volume. I quote a part: Frequens apud Evangelistas et diligentissime 
observanda est hac nomenclatura, qua nemo nisi solus Christus, a nemine 
dum Ipse in terris ambularet nisi a semetipso, appellitatus est Filius hominis. 
Primum Joh. i. 52, ut primum reperti fuere qui Eum Messiam et Filiam 
Dei (ibid. ver. 50) agnoscerent; et deinceps swpissime, ante praedictionem 
passionis et post. Nam ab iis qui fidem in Ipsum suscipiebant, dictus est 
Filius David. Recte suspicati sunt Judi, eA designari Messiam (Joh. 
xii. 34). Nam ut Adamus primus cum το progenie dicitur Homa, sic 
Adamus secundus (1 Cor. xv. 45) dicitur Filius hominis; non ef notione 
qui filii hominis, id est tenues, opponuntur jiliis viri, id est potentibus 
(Ps. xlix. 3), quive homines communiter dicuntur filii hominum (Mare. 
iii, 28; Ephes. iii. 5; Ezek. ii. 1, et passim), sed cum articulo ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ 
ἀνθρώπου. Videtur articulus respicere prophetiam, Dan. vii. 13. Unus hie 
nempe homo est, quem Adamus, post lapsum, ex promissione expectavit pro 
toté sud progenie; ὁ δεύτερος, secundus (1 Oor. xv. 47), quem omnis prophetia 
Veteris Testamenti indigitavit, qui totius generis humani jura et primogeni- 
turam sustinet (Lue. iii. 23, 38) et cui uni, quod humani nominis nos non 
peniteat (Ps. xlix. 21), debemus (Rom. v. 15). Porro hac appellatione 
Christus, inter homines ambulans, et expressit et pro ceconomia illius 
temporis occultavit (cf. Matt. xxii. 45) inter homines, et Satanam celavit, 
se esse τὸν Ὑἱὸν, Filium absolute dictum, id est Filium Dei, promissum 
datumque homini (Gen. iii. 15; Isai. ix. 6), ortumque ex homine (Heb. 
ii. 11), perinde uti uno evaltationis vocabulo et crucem et glorificationem 
suam insignivit (Joh. xii. 32). j 


PHILIP AND NATHANAEL. 77 


Amen (Rey. iii. 14), the God of truth (Isai. lxv. 16), in 
whom all the promises of God are Yea and in whom 
Amen (2 Cor. i. 19; cf. Num. v. 22; Neh. viii. 6). How 
different too the majestic, ‘J say unto you, of Christ from 
that, ‘ Thus saith the Lord, of all the prophets preceding— 
they bearers of the word of another, He the utterer of his 
own. In the promise itself with which the Lord rewards the 
commencing faith of Nathanael (cf. Ezek. i.1; Matt. iii. 6; 
Acts vii. 55; X. 11) we are at once, as by almost all ex- 
positors ancient and modern is admitted, thrown back 
upon that wondrous ladder which Jacob saw, reaching 
from earth to heaven, with the Lord at the summit, and 
angels of God ascending and descending upon it (Gen. 
XXvil. 12)... What Israel saw, the true ‘ Jsraelite’ shall 
behold the same;” yea what one saw but in dream, the 
other shall behold in waking reality; and more and 
better even than this; for then God was a God afar off; 
the Lord stood above the ladder and spake from heaven; 


1 Witsius indeed (Melet. Leid. p. 296) suggests that the reference here 
may after all not be to this passage, as we all take for granted, but to 
another: Non diffiteor interim fieri potuisse ut et alio respexerit Dominus. 
Magnam affinitatem cum hoc dicto habet Dan. vii. 13, 14, ubi Messias 
vocatur Filius hominis, et repreesentatur ut Filius Dei, veniens in nubibus 
celi ad Antiquum Dierum, additurque datwm ei esse dominatum et regnum. 
Quum itaque professus esset Nathanaél Jesum esse Filium Dei et Regem 
Israélis, utrumque admittit Jesus, protestaturque se revera esse filium 
hominis, de quo prophetaverit Daniel, quod manifestum futurum ipse pre- 
nunciat ex insigni illo ministerio sibi ab angelis exhibendo. Nam sicut ad 
majestatis divine gloriam facit quod thronus Antiqui Diernm myriadibus 
angelorum cinctus sit, ita et argumentum celestis regni in filio hominis est, 
quod iidem angeli ad ipsius nutum quaquaversum volent, adscendentes et 
descendentes prout jusserit. This is’ certainly ingenious; but does not 
shake one’s conviction that the other and generally received allusion is the 
true one. 

* Augustine (Serm, cxxii. 5) Quasi diceret, Cujus nomine te appellavi, 
ipsius somnium in te apparebit. Of. Con. Faust. xii. 26. Grotius: Quod 
ibi in somnio vidit Israél idem vigilans visurus dicitur verus Israélita. 


Β΄ THE CALLING OF 


but now standing at its foot, He speaks as the Son of man 
from earth, for now the Word has been made flesh; and 
the tabernacle of God is with men (Rev. xxi. 3). 

At the same time there is that in this promise of Christ 
which has at all times perplexed interpreters not a little. 
This is plain from the omission of ‘hereafter, or ‘from 
henceforth,* in many Greek copies ; the absence of which, 
however, while it might lighten, would not remove the 
difficulty ; as again from various gratuitous suppositions, 
as of some special, though unrecorded, vision of angels 
vouchsafed to Philip and Nathanael. It appears not less 
in the fact that several expositors, Augustine for instance 
uniformly,’ explain away these ‘ angels’ into messengers of 
the New Covenant, apostles and others, who should find 
in Christ the middle point of all their spiritual activity— 
going forth from Him, and returning to Him (Luke x. 1, 17). 
These all can only be regarded at the best as devices 
for escaping such difficulties as this passage may offer, not 
as methods of solving them. Equally unprofitable, and 
leading as little to a true solution, are all those enquiries 
as to whether this word of Christ's might not have 
been fulfilled at the Baptism, when we are told that the 
heavens were divided (Mark i. 10; ef. Ezek. i. 1), or at the 
Temptation, when angels ministered to Him (Matt. iv. 1), 
or at the time of the Agony, when an angel strengthened 
Him (Luke xx. 43), or at some other moment when we 
may presume angels in especially near communion with the 
Lord. He who thus asks when this promise was fulfilled, 
declares by the fact of making such an enquiry that he 


Ὁ Απ’ ἄρτι, which some suppose to have found its way here from Matt. 
XXvi. 64. 
* Con. Faust. xii. 26; παν». in Ps. xliv. 8; In Ev. Joh. Tract. 7. 


PHILIP AND NATHANAEL, 79 


has failed to enter into the meaning of the promise. We 
can select no single moment as that in which it found its 
fulfilment, because it was being fulfilled evermore. 
Assuredly the Lord would indicate by these wondrous 
words that He should henceforward be the middle point 
of a free intercourse, yea, of an uninterrupted communion, 
between God and men; that in Him should be the 
meeting place of heaven and of earth (Ephes. i. 10; 
Col. 1. 19); which should be no longer two, as sin had 
made them, separated and estranged from one another, 
but one, now that righteousness had looked down from 
heaven, and truth had flourished out of the earth.! And 
this the glory of Christ they, his disciples, should behold, 
and should understand that they too, children of men, 
were by Him, the Son of man, made citizens of a kingdom 
which, not excluding earth, embraced also heaven. From 
earth there should go up evermore supplications, aspira- 
tions, prayers,—and these by the ministration of angels 
(Rev. vii. 3, 4), if some still want a certain literal fulfil- 
ment ;—from heaven there should evermore come down 
graces, blessings, gifts, aid to the faithful and punishment 


* Calvin on this point says well: Multum autem errant meo judicio qui 
anxie querunt tempus et locum, ubi et quando Nathanaél et reliqui ccelum 
apertum viderint. Potius enim quiddam continuum designat, quod semper 
extare debebat in ejus regno. Fateor quidem aliquoties discipulis visos 
fuisse angelos, qui hodie non apparent; . . . sed si probe reputemus quod 
tunc factum est, perpetuo viget. Nam quum prius clausum esset regnum Dei, 
vere in Christo apertum fuit. Ohemnitz (Harm. Hoang. c. 25): Docet 
igitur Christus, officium suum esse cwlum aperire, et celestia rursus con- 
jungere cum genere humano, quod per peccatum et a Deo et a sanctis 
angelis avulsum fuerat. It is very noticeable that the only occasion on 
which that phrase of depth and meaning inexhaustible, namely, ‘ the king- 
dom of God’ (βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ), oceurs either in the Old Testament or the 
Apocrypha, it is with a manifest allusion to Jacob’s dream, in which dream, 
vouchsafed to the patriarch, it is said, ‘Wisdom shewed him the kingdom of 
God’ (Wisd. x. 10). 


8ο THE CALLING OF 


for them that would hurt them (Rev. viii. 5; Acts xii. 7, 23). 
Heaven and earth should henceforward be in continual 
interchange of these blessed angels, 


‘And earth be changed to heaven, and heaven to earth; 

One kingdom, joy and union without end :’ 
the Son of man, Jesus of Nazareth, being the central 
point in which these two kingdoms met,’ the golden clasp 
which bound them indissolubly together. And so it is 
only according to the right order that these angels should 
be described as first ascending, and only then descending ; 
when we might rather have anticipated that they would 
have descended first, and ascended afterwards. The 
order of priority here can only be rightly understood, 
when we lift ourselves above all notions of space or room 
or of a local heaven. The angels needed not to come 
down on the Son of man, before they went up from Him; 
but where He was, there were they. The person of the 
Son of man was, so to speak, the point of starting for 
them; and because the Lord here contemplates Himself 
not as in heaven but on earth, they therefore ascend first, 
and only afterwards descend.’ 

1 Calvin: Ideo super ipsum ascendere et descendere dicuntur: non quod 
illi soli ministrent, sed quod ejus respectu atque in ejus honorem complect- 
antur sud cura totum Ecclesia corpus. 

* The heathen parallel to this of Jacob’s ladder, thus binding heaven and 
earth together,—that which is, as it were, a feeling after this glorious union 
which Christ here at once proclaims and constitutes,—is the golden chain by 


which poets feigned that this earth of ours was linked to the throne of 
Zeus. 

* Plato in a beautiful passage (Symp. 23) describes the middle powers 
which maintain the commerce between heaven and earth, gods and men, 
in language that forcibly reminds us of this of our Lord. I will quote his 
words, for though sufficiently familiar, I have never seen them brought into 
relation with the Scripture before us: καὶ γὰρ πᾶν τὸ δαιμόνιον μεταξύ ἐστι 
θεοῦ τε καὶ θνητοῦ, ἑρμηνεῦον καὶ διαπορθμεῦον θεοῖς τὰ παρ᾽ ἀνθρώπων, καὶ ἀν- 
θρώποις τὰ παρὰ θεῶν͵ τῶν μὲν τὰς δεήσεις καὶ θυσίας, τῶν δὲ τὰς ἐπιτάξεις τε 
καὶ ἀμοιβὰς τῶν θυσιῶν: ἐν μέσῳ δὲ ὃν ἀμφοτέρων συμπληροῖ, ὥστε τὸ πᾶν αὐτὸ 
αὐτῶ συνδεδέσθαι. 


PHILIP ‘AND NATHANAEL. oe 


A few words in conclusion on the question whether 
this Nathanael of St. John is one and the same with the 
Bartholomew of the synoptic Gospels. The identifying 
of the two, which, when once suggested, carries so much 
probability with it, and which in modern times has found 
favour with so many, was quite unknown to the early 
Church. Indeed Augustine more than once enters at 
large into the question, why Nathanael, to whom his Lord 
bore such honourable testimony, whom He welcomed so 
gladly, was not elected into the number of the Twelve. 
The reason he gives is curious. He sees evidence in 
Nathanael’s question, ‘ Can there any good thing come out 
of Nazareth?’ that this disciple was a Rabbi, learned in 
the wisdom of the Jewish schools (that he should be 
numbered among fishermen, John xxi. 2, makes this 
unlikely, yet not impossible); but such the Lord would 
in no case choose to lay the foundations of his Church 
(cf. 1 Cor. i. 26); lest that Church might even seem to stand 
in the wisdom of man rather than in the power of God.* 
The arguments for the identity of the two, which identity 
was first suggested, I believe, by Rupert of Deutz in 
the twelfth century, are very strong. They are mainly 
these ; that Nathanael’s vocation here is coordinated with 
that of apostles, as of equal significance ; that on a later 
occasion we meet him in the midst of apostles, some 
named before him, some after (chap. xxi. 1, 2); that the 
three earlier Evangelists never mention Nathanael, the 
fourth never Bartholomew ; that Philip and Bartholomew 

1 Enarr. in Ps. \xv. 2; In Ho. Joh. tract. vii. ὃ 17. Of. Gregory the 
Great (Moral. xxxiii. 16): Preedicatores infirmos abjectosque habere studuit 
Dominus; unde in Evangelio Nathanaélem laudat, nec tamen in sorte 
pradicantium numerat; quia ad preedicandum eum tales venire debuerant, 


qui de laude propria nihil habebant. 
G 


82 THE CALLING OF PHILIP AND NATHANAEL. 


in the catalogue of the apostles are grouped together, as 
a pair of friends, but with Philip first, even as he is here 
the first in Christ (Matt. x. 30; Mark iii. 18) ; that the cus- 
tom of double names seems to have been almost universal 
at that time in Judza, so that all or well nigh all the 
apostles bore more than one; to all which may be added 
that Bartholomew is no proper name, signifying only son 
of Tolmai. All these arguments in favour of the identity, 
with nothing against it, bring it very nearly to a certainty, 
that he to whom the promise of the vision of an opened 
heaven, with angels ascending and descending on the Son 
of man, was vouchsafed, was no other than Bartholomew 
the apostle. 


3. CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


John iv. 1—42. 


Iv is very characteristic of the Eastern colouring of Scrip- 
ture, that so many of its most interesting events should 
find place in the neighbourhood of wells, and in one way 
or other stand in some direct connexion with them. Bya 
well of water the loveliest idyllic scene in Genesis, rich as 
it is in such, I mean the first meeting of Abraham’s servant 
with the future wife of Isaac, is laid (Gen. xxiv. 1-28) ; 
there Jacob’s first greeting of Rachel (Gen. xxix. 1-10) ; 
with a well too is closely linked an important passage in 
the life of Moses (Exod. ii. 17). But deeper, more 
attractive, laying a mightier hold on the Church in all 
aftertimes than any or all of these, is the discourse which 
found place by Jacob’s well, of which we have a record 
in the fourth chapter of St. John. 

The Evangelist explains to us first what the circum- 
stances were which brought it about: ‘When therefore the 
Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made 
and baptized more disciples than John, . . . He left Judea 
and departed again into Galilee’ This quitting of Judzea 
and retiring to the safer Galilee as here recorded, I identify 
with Matt. iv. 12, Mark i. 14, Luke iv. 14, in the synoptic 
Gospels. As Christ had taught his disciples that there 


were occasions when they might withdraw from the malice 
G2 


84 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


of their foes (Matt. x. 23), so He was Himself withdrawing 
here. That malice, as He knew, would be roused to the 
uttermost by the manifest successes of his ministry, by 
the multitude of disciples whom He had baptized—more 
even than the Baptist himself (iii. 26-30) ; although the 
mere ministerial act of baptism, as the Evangelist is careful 
to note, He accomplished by other hands than his own; 
‘though Jesus Himself baptized not, but his disciples’ 
(cf. Acts x. 48; 1 Cor. i. 14-16), He reserving the baptism 
with the Holy Ghost for Himself. He had left Judea, the 
head-quarters of all the bitterest opposition to Himself 
and to his work; and as, in retiring to Galilee, He did not 
choose to take the circuit of Persea, which was the manner 
with some of the stricter sort of Jews, who would come 
into no contact whatever with the heretical Samaritans, ‘He 
must needs go through Samaria. * St. John is thus careful 
to note that this was no mission to the Samaritans which 
the Lord undertook. On the contrary, the law which He 
imposed on his disciples, ‘and into any city of the 
Samaritans enter ye not’ (Matt. x. 5), this, during the days 
of his flesh, He imposed also on Himself. He was not sent 
‘put to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. xv. 24 ; 
Acts xiii. 46); and if any grace reached Samaritan or 
heathen, it was, so to speak, but by accident, a crumb 
falling from the children’s table. 

‘ Then cometh He to a city of Samaria, which is called 
Sychar.’ The unusual form in which the name of this 
city here appears, must not hinder us from recognizing in 
it the Sichem where Abraham built an altar (Gen. xii. 6); 
under the oak in whose neighbourhood Jacob buried the 


idols of his household (Gen. xxxv. 4); the city which 
» See Josephus, Vita, ὃ 52. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 85 


Simeon and Levi so cruelly and treacherously wasted, 
forfeiting their birthright thereby (Gen. xxxiv.; xlix. 
5-7); not far from which Joseph was sold (Gen. xxxvii. 12); 
the last resting place of his bones (Josh. xxiv. 32) ; a city 
thus of ancient fame in Scripture, as of great political 
importance at some periods of Jewish history ; so much 
so that in all likelihood, had the tribe of Ephraim 
attained to the leadership of the nation instead of Judah, 
had this tribe not forfeited and let go the preeminence 
which it possessed for a time (Ps. Ixxviil. 67), Shechem 
instead of Jerusalem would have been the metropolis of 
the kingdom. It was in Joshua’s time the centre to which 
the tribes were gathered (Josh. xxiv. 1); the seat of the 
abortive kingdom of Abimelech (παρ. ix.) ; a city twice 
mentioned by the Psalmist (Ps. lx. 6 ; eviii. 6) for no other 
reason than its dignity and strength; the place whither 
the ten tribes were gathered on that fatal day when the 
great schism of the nation actually began, and for a while 
the chief city of the revolted ten (1 Kin. xii. 1, 25), that 
is until the capital was transferred first by Jeroboam to 
Tirzah, and finally by Omri to Samaria (1 Kin. xvi. 14). 
With the building by the Samaritans of the temple on 
Mount Garizim, of which more presently, Shechem, 
standing immediately at the foot of the mountain on the 
ridge or saddle that joins it to Mount Ebal, became the 
ecclesiastical metropolis of the Samaritans, the middle 
point of their worship, and continues such to this day for 
the feeble remnant of them which survives.’ 

* It is now known as Nabulus, a corruption of Neapolis, which name was 
given to the city by the Herodians, who in the Roman times adorned and in 
part rebuilt it. On all which concerns Nabulus, Garizim, the Samaritans 


of the past and of the present, see Robinson’s Researches in Palestine, vol. iii. 
pp. 92-139. There is much too of original information in the article 


86 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


But if “‘Sychar’ be thus identified with Sichem, or Sychem 
(Acts vii. 16), and only a few, as Ewald for example, 
refuse to identify them, how are we to account for the 
form which the word has here assumed? We must for 
this keep in mind the enigmatic character of St. John’s 
Gospel, the mystical significance which he loves to trace 
in names, either to find or to suggest (see ix. 7; xi. 16). 
His Gospel, apparently less, is indeed far more, thoroughly 
steeped in the Old Testament, connected with it by finer 
and subtler links, than any one of the other three. A 
change in the form of the word, if only it were significant, 
would be quite in the spirit of the Old Testament, and in 
agreement with the importance which names everywhere 
there assume; being continually modified, now for the 
better, as Abram into Abraham (Gen. xvii. 5), Sarai into 
Sarah (Gen. xvii. 15),Oshea into Jehoshuah(Num. xiii. 16); 
now for the worse, thus Bethel into Bethaven (Hos. 
x.5), Achan, because he troubled Israel (Josh. vii. 25), 
reappearing as Achar (1 Chron. ii. 7); or it may be that 
a new name is superadded to the old (Gen. xxxii. 28; 
XXxv. 10; Judg. vi. 32), sometimes puts the old quite out 
of use; this new also being sometimes for honour, or 
more rareiy for dishonour. 

How deeply seated in our nature this tendency to the 
changing or modifying of names is, the curious ways in 
which it is evermore at work, springing as it does out of 
a sense that the name connotes, or if it does not connote, 
should be made to connote, the thing which is named, 
there need no examples to prove.’ Nor has the kingdom 


Samaria, in Herzog’s Encyclopddie, vol. xiii. pp. 359-391; and also in 
Heidenheim’s Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift, No. i. pp. 1-433; 78-128, who, 
p. 14, gives further notices of the literature on the subject. 

* Various illustrations of this tendency to bring the name and the thing 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 87 


of grace refused to avail itself of this instinct, as the many 
instances just cited in proof abundantly testify. St. John 
by this turn of the word, which has brought it into closest 
connexion with the Hebrew for a lie, declares at what 
rate he esteemed the whole Samaritan worship, declares 
by anticipation at what rate it was esteemed by his Lord 
(see ver. 22). If religion be anything higher than the — 
expression of man’s spiritual needs and desires, if it rest 
not on what man has thought and felt about God, but on 
that which God has revealed about Himself, and only has 
worth as it is the true revelation by God of Himself to his 
creatures, then that whole worship was a hollow thing, a 
husk with no kernel within; and, professing as it did to 
be much more than this, was a lie. If it sound severe on 
the part of the beloved apostle to say thus, and if some 
urge, as against this explanation of ‘ Sychar’ put here for 
Sichem, that he never could have said it, one can only 
reply that the truth zs severe, that in very faithfulness 
it must declare darkness to be dark, and bitterness to be 
bitter ; cannot affirm that the one is light, or the other 
sweet; or, when men have left God’s truth, and are 
worshipping instead of this some invention of their own, 
that their worship is any other thana lie. 

This city was ‘ near to the parcel of ground that Jacob 
gave to his son Joseph’ (Gen. xxxiii. 19; xlviii. 22 ; Josh. 
xxiv. 32). ‘Now Jacob's well* was there” Of Jacob’s 


into a real relation with one another I have given in The Study of Words, 
12th edit. pp. 24-30. 

* It would certainly have been preferable to render πηγή here by ‘ foun- 
tain’ or ‘spring’ than ‘wel/;’ for we can better understand ‘a springing 
fountain’ than a ‘springing well’ (ver. 14). Πηγή and φρέαρ, it may be ob- 
served, are used now the one, and now the other, throughout this chapter: 
but there is always sufficient reason to account for the use of one or of the 
other: thus πηγή twice in this verse, and at verse 14, φρέαρ at verses 11,12. 


88 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


well there is no mention in the Old Testament; though 
we learn there that it was the custom of the patriarchs to 
dig wells (Gen. xxi. 30; xxvi.18). There seems no 
reason whatever to call in question its identity with the 
well which the Samaritans of the neighbourhood designate 
by this name to the present day. The digging of it must 
have been a work of enormous labour. Maundrell, who 
visited it in 1697, gives this account : ‘It is dug in a firm 
rock, and contains about three yards in diameter, and 
thirty five in depth, five of which we found full of 
water. The rock has since crumbled, or in other ways 
the well has been in part filled in, and a recent measure- 
ment gives a depth of seventy five feet only, the spring at 
the bottom being choked. ‘ Jesus therefore, being wearied 
with his journey, sat thus’ on the well ; and it was about 
the sixth hour’ The weariness of Christ, so soon to be 
the refreshment of one, should in due time be the refresh- 
ment of all. St. John perhaps may name the exact hour, 
in this way to bring more vividly to our consciousness 
the oppression and burden of the time; it was ‘the siath 
hour, exactly the heat of the middle noon. Yet we must 
not leave out of sight that elsewhere he notes the hour, 


Our Translators, who have rendered both by ‘ well’ have failed to mark the 
alternation of words; which the Vulgate has noted, rendering the first by 
‘fons,’ the second by ‘puteus.’ And indeed ‘ all the Old Versions except the 
Anglo-Saxon render the Greek literally, giving a different term for πηγῇ 
and for ¢péap’ (Malan, Notes on the Gospel according to St. John, p. 49). The 
two Augustine here discriminates well (In Joh. Evang. Tract. 15): Omnis 
puteus fons, non omnis fons puteus. Ubi enim aqua de terr4 manat et usui 
prebetur haurientibus, fons dicitur: sed si in promtu et superficie sit, fons 
tantum dicitur ; si autem in alto et profundo sit, ita puteus vocatur ut fontis 
nomen non amittat. We have φρεάτων πηγή, Prov. v. 15. 

‘ Οὕτως, which may be explained with Chrysostom, ἁπλῶς καὶ ὡς ἔτυχε. 
Bengel: Sic, uti qualiscumque loci opportunitas ferebat, sine pompé, solus, 
ut qui non pr se ferret expectationem Samaritidis, sed mera lassitudinis 
causé quietem vellet capere. Admiranda popularitas vite Jesu! 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 89 


where it is difficult to say what of emphasis the story gains 
thereby, as 1. 39; xix. 14. Perhaps here, as there, it is 
the significance of the event, which makes its every detail 
of interest to himself, and as he judges to his readers. 

‘There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water ;’ 
a woman,’ not of the city of Samaria, for that was some 
six miles distant, but of the country (so Acts viii. 5), 
still called by the name of that city which had been once 
its capital. To that same well she oftentimes may have 
come already ; day by day, perhaps, during many a weary 
year in the past. And now she came once more, little 
guessing how different was to be the issue of this day’s 
coming from that of all the days which had gone before.’ 
The benefit and blessing which here lay, as it were, in 
ambush for her, was not indeed, as she was fain at the 
first to imagine, that she should never need to come and 
draw water from that well again (ver. 15) ; but, far better 
than this, that in the midst of that and all other the 
weary toil, outward and inward, of this earthly life, she 
should have within herself a fountain of joy, springing up 
unto life eternal, should draw water with joy from un- 
failing wells of salvation. 

She had probably already filled her pitcher, when the 
stranger at the well, whom she may have seen only to 
avoid, for she recognized in him those unmistakeable 
features of Jewish physiognomy with which the Samaritans 
had nothing in common, to her surprise addressed her, 
and to her greater surprise addressed her with a request ; 


? The Roman martyrology knows her name, Photina, the names also of 
her children. 

" Augustine: Venit mulier ad puteum, et fontem quem non speravit, 
invenit. 


go CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


‘Give me to drink’ (cf. Gen. xxiv. 16,17). A real thirst, 
witnessing against all docetic notions concerning the 
person of the Lord (cf. John xix. 28; Matt. xxi. 18), was 
one motive of his request; though that which He most 
truly thirsted after was her faith, the salvation of her 
soul;' for we see hunger and thirst not so much for- 
gotten as disappearing (ver. 31, 32) in the joy of winning 
such a lost soul for the kingdom of his Father. In 
this request of his, and in the discourse to which it was 
the prelude, there was a threefold testimony against the 
narrow-heartedness of his age and people—against that 
of the Jew who hated the Samaritan, of the Rabbi who 
would have thought scorn to hold this familiar intercourse 
with a woman (see ver. 27), of the Pharisee who would 
have shrunk from this near contact with a sinner (Luke 
Vii. 39). 

The-notice which follows, ‘for his disciples were gone 
away into the city to buy meat, is commonly interpreted, 
as explaining the constraint under which He lay of asking 
this favour of the woman. The disciples were gone, and 
had left Him ‘nothing to draw with’ (ver. 11), such as, 
had they been present, would have been at his command. 
But how very unlikely that such should have been part 
of their travelling gear; or if so, that they should have 
carried it with them into the town. The notice inter- 
posed here has no such superficial meaning. The Lord, 
allowing the disciples all to leave Him, had of intention 
made this solitude for Himself, that He might the easier 
win to repentance and confession of sin the poor sinner 
for whom He had appointed this meeting, though she 


1 Augustine: Ile autem qui bibere querebat, fidem ipsius mulieris 
queere bat. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. οι 


knew it not ;' for while there is none who may not take 
to himself that beautiful line of the Dies Tre, 


Querens me sedisti lassus, 


to her of first and best right it belongs. This absence of 
theirs was designed, was part of his counsel of love in her 
behalf. The freedom from interruption which it afforded 
He now improves to the uttermost; for, Himself the great 
‘Fisher of men’ (cf. Luke v. 10), He is as watchful and 
eager to take a single soul by the angle as a vast multitude 
of souls at once by the casting net or the sean; giving here 
a lesson to those whom He sends into the world to ‘ catch 
men, which they will do well never to forget. Heng- 
stenberg, indeed, thinks that αὐ had not left, that St. John 
was a witness of the interview which he describes ; but 
for this there is no shadow of ground. 

He who asks a favour places himself, in the estimate 
of a common mind, though often it is exactly the contrary, 
in a position of inferiority to the person from whom 
the favour is asked, and with whom it les to grant or 
to withhold it. And thus there was a certain satisfac- 
tion which she could not conceal, a gratifying of her 
national vanity, wounded so often by Jewish taunts, in 
thus having a Jew a petitioner for a favour from her, a 
Samaritan. The humiliation, for such she esteemed it, 
was much greater than if she, a Samaritan, had been a 
suitor for an equal favour from a Jew; inasmuch as the 
holding aloof and the refusing to be on terms of com- 
munion, either social or ecclesiastical, had been at the 
first, and still was, mainly on the side of the Jews; who, 

* Corn. ἃ Lapide: Factum id est tacit’ Dei providentid, ut, discipulis 


omnibus in urbem dimissis, solus ipse, liberius cum muliere impudicd ejus 
pudori consulens ageret. 


92 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


denied, rightly as regarded the fact, though wrongly in 
respect of the temper in which they did it, that the 
Samaritans had any claims to be considered as heirs with 
themselves of the promises made to Abraham and his 
seed. It was, as St. John expresses it, for the words are 
not the woman’s, but his, the Jews that would ‘ have no 
dealings with the Samaritans, no familiar intercourse, that 
is, and indeed none of any kind which they could avoid; 
and only as a consequence necessarily involved in this, 
that the Samaritans had no dealings with the Jews; and 
so it had been from the beginning (Hzra iv. 1-3). The 
woman therefore, not certainly a daughter of Rebekah in 
this (see Gen. xxiv. 17-20), instead of complying with his 
request, asks, with a feeling that for the present the tables 
are turned, and with the intention that He shall feel this 
also, ‘How is it that Thou, being a Jew, askest drink of 
me, which am a woman of Samaria?’ An Israelite she 
would have called herself, for such the Samaritans claimed 
to be, as descending from the tribe of Ephraim. <A ‘Jez’ 
for them was one of the tribe, or at most of the king- 
dom, of Judah. 

If we take this as the temper out of which her question 
proceeds, the Lord’s reply will then exactly meet the 
thought of her heart. He is not the receiver, but the 
giver. ‘Thou errest in thinking that it is I who need thy 
help, when thou rather hast need of mine. Jf thow 
knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, 
Give me to drink ; thow wouldest have asked of Him, and 
He would have given thee living water. This ‘gift of God’ 

thas been very variously interpreted. Augustine under- 
stands by it the Holy Ghost. Hengstenberg will not 
allow that there can be any question on the matter, but 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 93 


refers to Isai. ix. 5, ‘to us a Son is given, and to Jobn 
iii. 16, as decisive proofs that Christ designated Himself 
as ‘the gift of God. By ‘the gift of God’ Grotius and 
others understand the Lord more generally to mean that 
gracious and golden opportunity vouchsafed to her, and 
as yet to her alone among all her people;' ‘If thou 
knewest this, and what it is to have met Me here, the 
Saviour of the world, thou wouldest have been a petitioner 
of mine, for a far better gift than any I have sought at 
thy hands.’ Lampe, citing Rom. vi. 23, where ‘ eternal life’ 
is styled ‘the gift of God’ (χάρισμα there, δῶρον here), 
and strengthening his position by the aid of such passages 
as Isai. lv.1; Rev. xxii. 17, understands generally that 
‘eternal life’ to be ‘the gift of God, whereof here the 
Saviour speaks. But these explanations, one and all, 
seem to me either too vague and indefinite, or otherwise 
beside the mark; and the right interpretation to have 
been strangely overlooked by most expositors ; not indeed 
by all, for Stier has it. To me this carries such conviction 
that, unless so many had missed, I should have been 
tempted to say that it was impossible to miss it. ‘ Zhe gift 
of God’ is here an anticipation of what is immediately to 
follow, namely, ‘He would have given thee living water. 
‘If thou knewest,’ the Lord would say, ‘ that God has 
given to souls thirsting in the wilderness of this world 
water of life, such as will slake the thirst, not of their 
bodies but of their souls, and “ who it ἐξ that saith to thee, 
Give me to drink,” even He that has that water to bestow, 
whom the Father has made to be Himself a fountain and 
spring of this life, then, instead of moving the embers of 
that wretched quarrel between Samaritans and Jews, thou 


1 Occasio nempe quam tibi nunc Deus prastat, quantumvis Samaritidi. 


94 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


wouldest have asked these waters at his hands.’ The 
‘ Living water’ seems to me, beyond all doubt, to be itself 
‘the gift of God’ whereof Christ speaks.’ . 

Having asked for water He sets forth this ‘ gift’ under 
the image of water; as at John vi. 48-51, where men are 
waiting on Him for the bread that perishes, He sets forth 
the same under that of bread. In this as in every thing 
else a pattern to those who come after, He links on the 
heavenly to the earthly, uses the earthly as a ladder by 
which He mounts up to the heavenly. At the same time 
He must have been quite prepared for a temporary mis- 
understanding of his words. ‘ Living water’ is not neces- 
sarily equivalent with ‘ water of life’ (Rev. xxi. 6; xxii. 
1, 17) in the highest spiritual sense of the words. On the 
contrary there are natural waters which have, and in their 
lower sphere deserve, this name ; that is, fresh springing 
waters, as contrasted either with rain-water gathered into 
cisterns, or indeed with any other, the water of reser- 
voirs ; and in this natural sense the phrase often occurs 
in the Old Testament; as at Gen. xxvi.19; Lev. xiv. 5; 
Cant. iv. 15.” Here, however, the words are used in their 
highest sense,—waters, which coming from Him in whom 


1 There is a singular decorum in the use of words here. The woman has 
said, not unnaturally, ‘How is it that Thou askest (αἰτεῖς) of me?’ But 
αἰτεῖν is a word of petition as from an inferior to a superior, in this different 
from ἐρωτᾶν, which has more of equality in it (see my Synonyms of the 
New Testament, § 40). But when Christ refers to that request of hers, He 
does not take up and allow her word. It is not on his lips, ‘ who it is that 
asketh of thee,’ but ‘who it is that saith to thee’ ( ὁ λέγων oo); while the 
asking He goes on to describe as the proper attitude for her; ‘thou wouldest 
have asked (ἤτησας) of Him.’ There lies often in little details like this an 
implicit assertion of the unique dignity of his person, which it is very 
interesting and not unimportant to trace. 

2 In all these places the LXX. have ὕδωρ (av,=vivum flumen, vivus 
fons, in Latin. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 95 


is the absolute life, who is the αὐτοζωή (Johni. 4; v. 40) ; 
impart life to as many as they reach. We have a mag- 
nificent symbolism of this, the life-giving power of these 
waters, Ezekiel xlvii.g: ‘ Every thing shall live whither 
the river cometh ;’ that is, the river issuing from under 
the threshold of the House of God (ver. 1; cf. Rev. 
xxii. 1; Joel iii. 18; Zech. xiv. 8). 

Yet although she misses the deeper meaning of his 
speech, taking the figurative literally, and the spiritual 
naturally (cf. John ii. 4; vi. 53), there is that in the 
words and bearing of this Stranger, which has already so 
far inspired her with respect, that the ‘ Sir, which was 
absent from her first answer, finds place in her second ; 
however she may hardly maintain herself through the 
whole of her answer at the level of respect which this 
opening word would imply. Indeed she proceeds with 
the evident intention of showing Him that these preten- 
sions of his involve an absurdity : ‘ Thou hast nothing to 
draw with, and the well is deep ; from whence then hast 
Thou this living water? From this well it cannot be 
that Thou wilt draw that living water of which Thou 
speakest, for the well is deep’ (as we have seen, more than 
a hundred feet deep, with only a few feet of water at the 
bottom), ‘and Thou hast no means with which to draw it 
up. And even if Thou hadst discovered another well’ 


* The ἄντλημα here, ‘ bucket’ in most of our early Versions, ‘hawritorium’ 
in Augustine (which word has not found its way into any of our Dictionaries 
of later Latinity), must not be confounded with the ὑδρία or water-pot which 
the woman presently leaves behind in her haste to communicate her good 
tidings to her people (ver. 28). Itis the ‘situla, generally made of skin, 
with three cross sticks tied round the mouth to keep it open. Itis let down 
by a rope of goats’ hair, and may be seen lying on the curb stones of almost 
every well in the Holy Land’ (Malan). We may suppose the woman to. 
have held this in her hand, while she talked to the Lord, and reminded 
Him that He had nothing of the kind. 


οὔ CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


(for this is the connexion of ver. 11 and 12), ‘art Thow 
greater than our father Jacob’ (cf. viii. §2), for such she 
calls him, though with no shadow of right' (Matt. x. 5) ; 
‘who gave us the well, and drank thereof hiniself, and his 
children ;’—or ‘his sons’ rather, ‘since one daughter to 
twelve sons would not make them τέχνα τοῦ ᾿Ιαχώβ in a 
narrative written in Greek’ (Malan),—‘ and his cattle.’ 
The word rendered ‘ cattle’ (θρέμματα) probably includes 
household servants as well. That Jacob himself and his 
sons should have drunk of that well might be taken as an 
evidence of its sweetness, that his servants and flocks and 
herds should have drunk of it, of its abundance,’ the 
waters of it thus satisfying the needs of him and of all 
that were his. ‘Art Thou greater, she would imply, 
‘that so Thou couldst give to those waters, even if Thou 
couldst discover such, a higher consecration, or constitute 
them waters of greater price to us than these with which 
the patriarch Jacob has endowed us? There speaks out 
in this question of hers a certain slight resentment at 
what seems to her an intentional depreciation of this holy 
well, for such no doubt it was esteemed by these Samari- 
tans. That well was one of the venerable memorials of 
the past (it is possibly alluded to Gen. xlix. 22; Deut. 
Xxxiii. 28), by aid of which they sought to put themselves 
in connexion with the early patriarchal history. It lay, 
as we have seen, in the parcel of ground given by Jacob 
to his son Joseph (ver. 5, 6), and it was from Joseph that 
the Samaritans boasted their descent. This we should 


1 Theophylact: πατέρα ἑαυτῆς ποιεῖται τὸν ᾿ἸἸακὼβ, εἰς τὴν ᾿Ιουδαϊκὴν 
εὐγένειαν αὐτὴν συνωθοῦσα. 

3 Theophylact: τὸ δὲ καὶ αὐτὸς ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἔπιεν, ἔπαινός ἐστι τῆς τοῦ ὕδατος 
ἡδύτητος - τὸ δὲ καὶ τὰ θρέμματα αὐτοῦ͵ ἐνδεικτικόν ἐστι τῆς ἀφθονίας. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 97 


conclude from the fact of their claiming to be the repre- 
sentatives of the ten tribes, of which Ephraim, descended 
from Joseph, was chief; but Josephus twice expressly men- 
tions the fact." Here is the key to the voluble eloquence, 
not unmixed with a certain tartness, of her reply. The 
woman suspects, though she cannot quite understand his 
words, that He, a Jew, means to cast a slight upon the 
venerable traditions and memorials which her people 
claimed as especially, if not peculiarly, their own. 

“The Lord does not entangle Himself in a direct reply 
to the question, ‘Art Thou greater than our father Jacob ?? 
which could lead to no result; and yet implicitly He does 
reply. For as, in magnifying the bread which He would 
give, as compared with the manna which Moses gave, 
He reminds his hearers that those who ate the manna died 
notwithstanding, leaving them to draw the conclusion 
that He, who gives bread which if a man eat thereof he 
shall not die, must be greater than Moses, who could give 
no such ‘salve of immortality’ (John vi. 49, 50); even 
so the same follows here: ‘I am greater than your father 
Jacob ; for this water which you boast to have received 
from him does not slake thirst for ever. Whosoever 
drinketh of this water shall thirst again. But it is other- 
wise with the water of which I am the dispenser. Who- 
soever shall drink of the water that I shall give him shall 
never thirst. It is needless to observe of how much wider 
application the words, ‘ shall thirst again, are than to the 
matter immediately in hand. All human suppliances for 
the satisfying of the cravings of the body or of the soul, 
have in them this defect, that they do not satisfy for ever. 
They only serve to dull and deaden the present sense of 


Antt, IX. 14.3; Xt. 8. 6. 
H 


98 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


the want, but do not remove it. That want after a while 
revives again in its strength; for man is full of hunger 
and thirst; a fact which may, indeed, be his heaven, 
yet may also be his hell. But the water which Christ 
gives, slakes the spirit’s thirst, and slakes it for ever—not, 
of course, as though one draught of it would do this; it 
is he who drinks, and who continues to drink, that shall 
not thirst any more. 

It is worth our while here to note how Christ gathers to 
a head innumerable promises and invitations of the Old 
Testament, and claims them as fulfilled in Himself; thus 
eminently Isai: Iv. 1; cf. xli. 18; xlvit. 215) ΣΝ. 
even as this is by no means the only place in the New 
Testament where He sets forth the blessings which He 
imparts to the children of men by aid of the same figurative 
language, at once so beautiful, so familiar, and so intelli- 
gible to all; thus see John vi. 35; vii. 37; Rev. vii. 16; 
xxi.6. He is Himself the true ‘ fountain of Jacob’ (Deut. 
XxXxiii. 28) ; this name He implicitly challenges as his own. 
There is only One, who can be what Christ here declares 
that He is, namely, ‘a fountain of living waters’ (see Jer. 
ii. 13; xvii. 13), and that is God. On the strength of 
this saying Augustine rightly claims Ps. xxxvi. 9, ‘ With 
Thee is the fountain of life,’ as fulfilled in Christ, and 
brings that passage into closest connexion with this.* 

But what, it may be fitly asked, is the exact force of 
the promise which follows, ‘ Lut the water that I shall give 
him shall be in him® a well of water springing up into 
everlasting life’? Is it not this? ‘He who receives this 

? De qué ergo aqué daturus est, nisi de ill4, de qua dictum est, Apud Te est 


fons vite? Nam quomodo sitient, qui inebriabuntur ab ubertate domis tus? 
? Origen here asks, τίς δὲ ἐν ἑαυτῶ ἔχων πηγὴν, διψῆσαι οἷός τε ἔσται; 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 99 


living water of Me shall become himself in some sort, 
although of course only in a secondary sense, a springing 
well; no cistern merely to contain,’ but a springing foun- 
tain out of which shall flow, these same waters ;? shall 
minister to others the same salvation which has been 
already ministered to himself ;’* even as the Lord expresses 
the same truth elsewhere: ‘ He that believeth on Me, out 
of his belly shall flow rivers of living water’ (John vii. 38). 
The image of the spark which, fastening where it lights, 
kindles into a flame and spreads, or of the seed which, 
taking root, shoots up again into the air,* either of these 
would lend itself more perfectly to the setting forth of 
the truth which Christ here proclaims. He does not how- 
ever think good to travel out of the circle of images which 


1H. de 85. Victore (dn Eccles. Hom. 2): Scimus namque quia cisterna 
idcirco foditur, ut aqua extrinsecus collecta in eam defluat, et ex θὰ rursum in 
usus hominum transitura hauriatur. Sed hee quia venam vivam non habet, 
quantumlibet magna et aquarum collectione redundans videatur, aliquando 
exhauriri potest et exsiccari; quia cum sublatum fuerit et consumptum 
quod aliunde infunditur, nihil ei de suo superest unde reparetur. Sed fons 
qui vivam habet venam, etiamsi modicus est, deficere tamen omnino non 
potest, neque effusionis suze defectum aliquando sentit, cui sine defectu 
semper de proprio incrementum accedit. 

2 The imperial philosopher of Rome uttered a great truth, but an im- 
perfect one, saw much but did not see all, did not see that this spring 
of water must be fed, and fed evermore, from the ‘upper springs,’ if it is not 
presently to fail, when he wrote, ἔνδον βλέπε: ἔνδον ἡ πηγὴ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, καὶ ἀεὶ 
ἀναβλύειν δυναμένη, ἐὰν ἀεὶ σκάπτῃς. Of. Plutarch De Virt. et Vit. τ. 

3 Origen quotes with approbation Heracleon’s interpretation of these words, 
the same which I have given above: οὐκ ἀπιθάνως δὲ τὸ, ἀλλομένου, διηγήσατο, 
καὶ τοὺς μεταλαμβάνοντας τοῦ ἄνωθεν ἐπιχορηγούμενου πλουσίως Kai αὐτοὺς 
ἐκβλύσαι εἰς τὴν ἑτέρων αἰώνιον ζωὴν τὰ ἐπικεχορηγημένα αὐτοῖς. Gregory of 
Nyssa, in his Homilies on The Song of Solomon, has some beautiful remarks 
in the same sense on Cant. iv. 15, where the Bride is compared to ‘a well of 
living waters.’ I quote a few words: τοῦτο δὴ τὸ πάντων παραδοξότατον' 
πάντων yap τῶν φρεάτων ἐν συστήματι τὸ ὕδωρ ἐχόντων, μόνη ἡ Νύμφη διεξοδικὸν 
ἐν ἑαυτῇ ἔχει τὸ ὕδωρ, ὥστε τὸ μὲν βάθος ἔχειν τοῦ φρέατος, τοῦ δὲ ποταμοῦ τὸ 
ἀεικίνητον. 

4 Maldonatus : Loquitur de ἀφαὰ tanquam de planta aut semine aliquo quod 
jactum in terra nascatur. 

H 2 


100 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


the well and the water supply. And not only shall these 
waters spring up, but they shall spring up ‘ into everlasting 
life. They shall find their own level: they shall return 
whither they came: coming from God, they shall go to 
God again. There is a tacit comparison here with the 
waters of this world. Whatever upward impulse these 
may receive, it is presently spent, and they fall back to 
the earth again; but the water of life is borne upward by 
a supernatural impulse, till it reaches again that heaven 
from which it came.” 

Olshausen and others have invited us to notice, upon 
these words, the contrast between this promise of Christ 
and another of the Son of Sirach. In a glorious passage, 
one of the noblest in the books not directly inspired of 
the Bible, Wisdom praising herself exclaims, ‘ They that 
eat me shall yet be hungry, and they that drink me shall 
yet be thirsty’ (Heclus. xxiv. 21). We are invited to note 
here the deep insight into the different blessings of the Old — 
and of the New Covenant, which a comparison between 
the promises of the two passages affords—the blessing of 
the Old Covenant, the awakening of the desire; that of 
the New, the satisfying of this same desire; there the 
blessing, so to speak, on its more negative; here on its 
more positive, side. Now whatever truth there may be 
in the fact thus stated, and a relative truth there is, yet I 
scarcely think that we can fairly trace it here. When 
Christ says that he who drinks of the water which He 


* Grotius: Emphasis est in voce saliet. Solent enim aque salire ad alti- 
tudinem usque su originis. 

* Lampe: Elegans hic latet oppositio inter has aquas et illas que ex 
seaturigine terrestri proliciuntur. Quantocunque enim impetu prorum- 
pant, vix tamen ultra aliquot pedes in aérem elevantur. Hic vero sistuntur 
aque que vi plane supernaturali in celum ipsum et vitam eternam 
saliunt, , 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 101 


gives ‘ shall never thirst, it is surely meant that he shall 
never thirst for any other water save this living water 
which He Himself imparts." He too, no less than the 
Wisdom of the elder Covenant, would say that for this 
water he shall thirst and thirst again. . This, that he does 
so thirst again, that draughts of the waters of life breed 
no satiety, such as the draughts from the fountains of this 
world’s joy so quickly bring about, that these waters 
kindle the thirst which they assuage, is not the infelicity 
of him who drinks, but his blessedness rather. No one 
counts that it was faring ill with David, then when he ex- 
claimed, ‘ My soul is athirst for God, even for the living 
God.’ How many, as they read, have rather yearned that 
they might be athirst with him, only mourn that their 
own thirst is so languid, while they know that there is a 
river of God at which this thirst may be at once stilled 
and quickened, stilled in all which implies a want and a 
discomfort, quickened in all which shall drive it to seek 
for ever new supplies from Him, who is the indeficient 
fountain of all good.” Only so could it have been said, 
‘ Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness’ (Matt. v. 6; cf. Isai. xii. 3; xliv. 3; Ps. lxxxvii. 7). 

There is a certain blind longing after this springing 
water awakened in the soul of this poor sinner, who had 
thirsted so long, who now at this time was seeking to 
slake her thirst at one of the muddiest pools of sensual 
gratification; and out of this she exclaims, ‘ Sir, give 

* Cocceius: cum ed satietate non pugnat sitis et fames justitia, et spes 
atque ὑπόστασις et expectatio bonorum Dei in hdc vita et translationis in 
alteram. 

? Thus Drusius excellently well, reconciling the words of the earlier 
Wisdom with the words of the later: Qui aquam sapienti« bibit sitit et non 


sitit. Sitit, id est, magis magisque appetit id quod bibit. Non sitit, quia ita 
expletur ut alium potum non desideret. 


102 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


me this water, that I thirst not’ (cf. John vi. 34), though 
still there is confusion and contradiction in her mind 
about it, for she imagines that it will exempt her from the 
toil of coming to draw from that well any more—‘ neither 
come hither to draw.’ 


How are we to explain the check and abrupt turn 
which the conversation here receives, this ‘ Go call thy 
husband, and come hither, with which our Lord seems to 
interrupt it, just at its most interesting pot? [5 it, as 
some say, that being about to confer on her a benefit, He 
would not confer it on her alone; but on her and her 
husband together? This can hardly be—is indeed con- 
tradicted by the fact that Christ knew perfectly well 
about her, that her relations te him with whom she was 
living were not those of a wife to her husband. The 
words can only be taken as spoken with the intention of 
calling out that very answer which they did call out; of 
bringing her in this way to a wholesome shame. They 
attain the object with which they were uttered. The 
confession, indeed, which they elicit, ‘Z have no hus- 
band, is only a half confession; not all the truth, and 
yet true as far as it goes; and for the truth’s sake which 
it contains He accepts and allows it: ‘ Thou hast well said, 
1 have no husband ;’ with an emphasis on ‘ husband, 
which is marked in the Greek by its position in the sen- 
tence, and which might have been so marked in our Version 
—‘ Husband I have not. This she has ‘ said well’ (ef. 
Matt. xv. 7; Luke xx. 39), inasmuch as she had spoken 

‘ Sedulius (Carm. Pasch. 229): 

Orat inexhausti tribui sibi dona fluenti, 


Eternam positura sitim, qué nemo carere 
Dignus erit, Domini nisi mersus gurgite Ohristi. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 103 


the truth; for a true confession is always ‘well’ made, 
however ill it may be that the making of such a confession 
should be required. He proceeds, with how firm and 
at the same time how gentle a hand, to draw her from 
the hiding places in which she may still have hoped to 
lie hid, to unroll before her the blurred and blotted scroll 
of her past existence: ‘for thou hast had five husbands, 
and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband. In that 
saidst thou truly” Many words, He would imply, which 
she had spoken had not been true, but this mournful 
testimony which she had thus borne against herself was 
true. Meyer, including in these ‘five husbands’ him 
whom she now had, and making him the last of the five, 
and not a sixth added to them, argues from this that 
‘husbands’ must not be taken strictly ; but must probably 
include paramours, since certainly the last was such. 
But the argument rests on a misunderstanding. He with 
whom she is now living is not one of the five; but she, 
falling ever deeper and deeper in degradation, is now 
content to go without the legal sanction to her condition 
which in other times she may have required. Hitherto, 
we may well suppose, her life had been full of manifold 
disorders ; the five husbands had scarcely made room for 
one another by death; even in that case there must have 
been unseemliest hastening of nuptials, most mordinate 
desires, which no dealings of God could chasten or restrain. 
But doubtless there had been worse than this ; husbands 
whom she had forsaken; or whom she had compelled 
by breach of wedlock to put her away (Deut. xxiv. 1, 2; 
Matt. xix. 9).’ 


‘ Augustine has called this with which we are dealing a history, plena 
mysteriis et gravida sacramentis. Fully admitting it to be this, I yet 


104 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


Whether the Lord told her more which is not recorded 
(ver. 29 would seem to imply as much), or so told her 
this as to make her understand that He knew much 
more, the woman feels that she had to do with one 
who knows all the wretched secrets of her disordered life, 
and out of this feeling exclaims, ‘ Si, I perceive that thou 
art a prophet ; for such intuitive knowledge as this could 
only be God’s, or theirs to whom God should give it 
(1 Sam. ix. 19; 2 Kin. v. 26; vi. 12). She did not sup- 
pose, as some in modern times have supposed, that Christ 
had obtained the information about her from some of her 
neighbours ; but she saw in Him a prophet, and one who 
by the exercise of his prophetic gift had thus been able 
to tell her ‘all things that ever she did’ (ver. 29). There 
is no necessity of assuming that, in the case of every one 
with whom the Lord came in contact during the course 
of his ministry, He knew every detail of his anterior 


find it impossible to accept the allegorical interpretation of these ‘ five hus- 
bands,’ which Hengstenberg traces here. For him this woman is, so to 
speak, the representative of that Samaria out of which she comes, of its past 
idolatry, its present will-worship, its future conversion—her relations with 
her five husbands, and with him who was not her husband, having by 
divine Providence been so overruled as exactly to set forth the history up to 
that moment of her people. He refers us to 2 Kin. xvii. 24, where we find 
the five nations, the colluvies gentium out of which the Samaritans grew, 
bringing with them into their new seats each its own god, see ver. 29-31; 
and he further eites Josephus (Antt. ix. 14. 3): οἱ δὲ μετοικισθέντες εἰς τὴν 
Σαμαρείαν Χουθαῖοι, ἕκαστοι κατὰ ἔθνος ἴδιον θεὸν εἰς τὴν Σαμαρείαν κομίσαντες, 
πέντε δ᾽ ἦσαν, καὶ τούτους͵ καθὼς ἦν πάτριον αὐτοῖς, σεβόμενοι. With these her 
idol gods Samaria lived in a real communion, but one as lightly broken off 
as it had been knit; while He whom now she had was no legitimate hus- 
band of hers, for, ‘thy Maker is thy husband,’ true concerning the Jewish 
Church, was utterly false in respect of the Samaritan. It is certainly an 
ingenious suggestion, resting upon a very remarkable coincidence, but is 
scarcely more. When it is attempted to carry through the allegory it 
breaks down and that in parts essential ; thus these five false gods were con- 
‘temporaneous; while her five husbands had one succeeded the other; her sin 
had not been polyandry. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 105 


history ; but wherever this was needed for the interests 
of the kingdom of God, for the work of that ministry 
which He had come to fulfil, for the best interests of that 
soul which He sought to win, there through an act of his 
will He could by his divine Spirit unlock the past, read 
not merely what was now passing, but all which had ever 
passed in the hearts, or which had been externally 
wrought in the lives, of those with whom He had to do 
(John ii.,25; v.14). It concerned the counsels of his 
love that He should thus know concerning this poor 
sinner, and therefore He knew. 

Her whole tone is now changed. It was half earnest 
before, in that request, ‘ Ser, give me this water’ (ver. 15) ; 
but it is whofe earnest now; and it is quite a missing 
of the real earnestness which she now feels to take her 
words which follow: ‘Our fathers worshipped in this 
mount ; and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where 
men ought to worship, as though they were intended to 
draw off Him with whom she was speaking from pressing 
home upon her those unwelcome truths about her own 
life," by suggesting some general question, in which her 
people indeed might possibly have the worst ; but which 
yet brought home no peculiar personal shame to herself. 
The suggestion is ingenious, but it is much more in cha- 
racter with the effectual work which is being wrought, as 
the issue proves, in her soul, to ascribe these words to 
quite another motive. Hitherto she had never been really 
enough in earnest about the worship and service of God, 
to feel any misgiving or anxiety in respect of that great 

* So Massillon ina striking Lent Sermon on this history : Nouvelle artifice 
dont elle s’avise pour détourner la question de ses meeurs, qui lui déplait, 


et qui l’emparrasse, elle se jette habilement sur une question de doctrine, les 
contestations entre Jérusalem et Garizim. 


ιοό CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


controversy which was so eagerly debated between her 
people and the Jews. And yet, if the Jews were right, 
what was the whole Samaritan worship but a lie; not 
merely a service which God had not commanded, but 
which was contrary to his command, with unsoundness 
and rottenness at its very core? She had hitherto troubled 
herself nothing about this; she had taken things as she 
found them. But the time of such indifference was past; 
it became all-important for her to know in which of the two 
channels the line of blessing indeed ran, whether salvation 
was of the Samaritans or of the Jews; and hence her 
question, or rather her statement of the point at issue, 
which though not put in the form of a question, is 
evidently presented to the Lord that He may, if possible, 
satisfy her mind about it. 

But whom does she mean by ‘our fathers, on whom 
she would fain rely and lean as ‘having worshipped in this 
mount, on Mount Garizim, which rose up immediately 
before them; and given to it that consecration which 
her people claimed as peculiarly its own? ‘There are 
two answers, and there is certainly something to be said 
for both. Some understand by ‘ our fathers’ the founders 
of the Samaritan worship, the builders of the temple on 
this mountain, and they urge that, ‘ Our fathers wor- 
shipped, set over against ‘Ye worship, will admit no 
other interpretation. They would find the exact ex- 
ample here of one, who walking in a vain conversation 
defends it as having been received by tradition from her 
fathers (1 Pet.i.18). So Meyer, Alford, and others; yet 
I cannot so understand the words. The woman is 
declaring her position to a Jew, and doing what she can 
to maintain it as against him. But what force would it 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 107 


have with him to declare that from the beginning of that 
schism which he condemned throughout, her people had 
worshipped at Garizim? Take on the other hand ‘our 
fathers’ as the common fathers of Jew and Samaritan 
alike, at least as those whom the Samaritans claimed for 
‘fathers, some, as Adam, Seth, Noah with right, others, 
as the later patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with no 
right at all; and then there is some cogency in what she 
alleges, if only it had been true. They worshipped here ; 
in manifold ways they did honour to this mountain, and 
‘ye say that in Jerusalem, a place never heard of till a 
late period of our history (2 Sam. v. 6,7), occupied by the 
Canaanite to the time of David, ‘7s the place where men 
ought to worship. She knew that there was one such 
place, and one only, where the Lord would manifest his 
presence and put his name there, and that to this place 
all should resort (Deut. xii. 5). They could not then 
both be right, Jerusalem and Garizim; nay one must 
be utterly wrong; but which was it? Would He, this 
prophet, resolve this question for her, and if she and her 
people were wrong, convince her that they were so? 

But first, a word or two more on this assertion of hers, 
‘Our fathers worshipped in this mount, in further con- 
firmation of the interpretation which I have preferred. 
A modern writer, who has derived much of his informa- 
tion from personal intercourse with the Samaritan High 
Priest,’ tells us what they now believe, what in all likeli- 
hood they believed in our Saviouwr’s time, about Mount 
Garizim ; the honour, dignity, and preeminence which for 
it they claimed. It is for them the holy mountain of the 
world ; on its summit was the seat of Paradise ; from the 


1 Petermann, in Herzog’s Eneyclopddie, vol. xiii. p. 337, art. Samaria. 


108 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


dust of Mount Garizim Adam was formed; and the spot 
is still pointed out where he reared his first altar; the 
place too where Seth did the same. Garazim is the Ararat 
of Scripture, on which the Ark rested (Gen. viii. 4); 
which the waters of the Flood had never overflowed ; 
and which thus no dead thing borne by these waters had 
touched to defile. They point out further the exact spot 
on which Noah reared an altar to the Lord when the 
Flood has subsided (Gen. viii. 20) ; and the seven steps, 
on each of which he offered a burnt offering, which led 
up to it, are existing still. The altar too is to this day 
standing on which Abraham had bound his son, and the 
spot known where the ram was caught in a thicket by 
its horns (Gen. xxii. 13). At the summit of Garizim is 
Bethel, where Jacob slept and saw in a dream that won- 
drous ladder which reached from earth to heaven (Gen. 
XXvVlli. 12,19). There is a good deal more of the same 
kind; but this is enough. That poor woman, who may 
have accepted all this with implicit faith, would have had 
warrant more than enough for her boast, ‘Our fathers 
worshipped in this mount, if only a small part of it had 
been true. 

With a deep and solemn earnestness, such as the great- 
ness and importance of the announcement which He was 
making deserved, the announcement namely of a universal 
religion, the Lord replied. First indeed, and as a neces- 
sary condition of this, He proclaims the passing away of 
every form of religion which is tied to a local centre, by 
anticipation condemning Mahometanism here, as a retro- 
grade step in the spiritual history of humanity—so to 
make room for that faith, which should have its centre 
everywhere and its circumference nowhere. There was 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. τοῦ 


here, I say, a condemnation of every religion tied to a 
local centre ; for when Christ replied, ‘ Woman, believe Me, 
the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor 
yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father, annulling thus such 
earlier precepts as that of Deut. xii. 5, 6, this ‘ye’ must 
suffer no such limitation as should restrict it to the Sama- 
ritans alone, and to this question of the woman in respect 
of the place where they ought to worship. The words 
may refer, as Meyer says, to the future conversion of the 
Samaritans, ‘who thereby set free from the service on 
Garizim should not thereupon be brought to the service 
at Jerusalem’ ; but they have a much wider scope ; in this 
‘ye’ are included all the children of men, all the nations 
of the earth, as one by one they shall be brought into the 
true fold. Christ does not indeed use the communicative 
‘we, as another prophet would have done, as would 
have suited every other save Him who was the only-be- 
gotten of the Father; but, excepting Himself, his words 
do not except any other. 

The question which the woman had asked could not 
be resolved but in favour of Jerusalem; yet very ob- 
servable is the manner in which, before the Lord thus 
pronounces the claims of Garizim untenable and without 
a warrant, He lifts up the whole matter in debate into a 
higher sphere, and shows how in a little while the very 
subject matter of it will have disappeared altogether. 
That there could be such a controversy as this, whether 
at Jerusalem or at Garizim men ought to worship the 
Father, the very existence of such a dispute had its rise 

* Bengel has a subtle observation here: Ad Judaos et discipulos sepe 
Christus dixit, Dico vobis (ver. 35). Uno hoc loco ad Samaritida, Crede mihi. 


Illi magis obligati erant ad credendum, quam hee. Hane proportionem 
sequuntur formule. 


110 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


in the fact that even true religion itself hitherto had 
moved among ‘ elements of this world’ (Gal. iv. 3), and had 
owned a‘ worldly sanctuary’ (Heb. ix. 1), from which now 
it was about to disengage itself for ever; and once dis- 
engaged from these, the controversy would be possible no 
more, but that great prophetic word of Malachi would be 
fulfilled, ‘and in every place incense shall be offered unto 
my name, and a pure offering’ (Mal. i. 11). 

As concerns, indeed, the present and the past nothing 
can be more absolute than the decision which Christ 
pronounces in favour of Jerusalem and its worship, and 
against Garizim and the will-worship which was esta- 
plished there : ‘Ye worship ye know not what; we know 
what we worship; for salvation is of the Jews. This 
neuter ‘what’ has often made a difficulty ; we should cer- 
tainly have expected, ‘Ye worship ye know not whom; 
and again, ‘We know whom we worship. Some there- 
fore have made this ‘ what’ to express rather the manner 
than the olject of worship. But it was more probably 
selected to express the unreal character of their whole 
worship, the absence of any relation on their’ part to a 
personal God. It will then find its exact parallel in 
St. Paul’s use of ‘ the Godhead’ (τὸ θεῖον) at Acts xvii. 29. 
God is only truly worshipped of them whom He has shewn 
how to worship Him, and who worship Him in the way 
that He has shewn. He is only known of those to whom 
He makes Himself known. The Samaritan was eminently 
an énvented religion; more so in many respects than the 
traditional heathenism, which may have still kept traces, 
* not wholly effaced, of the original revelation; a name 
without a power, a temple without a temple’s God. The 
altar they reared was, in the saddest sense of the words, 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. ©111 


‘To an Unknown God, and one whom by means of that 
worship they could never know. The other ‘what’ in 
the second clause of the sentence will then be there only 
for the sake of concinnity. Had the assertion stood alone, 
it would have been,‘ We know whom we worship. ‘We’— 
for Christ here makes common part with his people, and 
speaks at once in his hwman character, therefore as a 
worshipper, and in his Jewish character, therefore as a 
worshipper at Jerusalem and in and through the service 
of the temple,—‘we know what we worship, no dream and 
imagination of man’s own heart, but One who has ap- 
pointed ways by which He may be approached, and who, 
sitting between the Cherubim, meets them who approach 
Him by these. A Jew might be full of darkness, many 
were so, in respect of the God whose name he bore, 
whose worshipper he professed to be; but that was his 
separate individual guilt, and sprang from a refusing to 
use, or from a not using aright, that knowledge of God 
to which he had been called; meanwhile every Jew, who 
was such in truth and not in name only, knew what and 
whom he worshipped. It was otherwise with the Sama- 
ritan. He did not fail in the right application of what 
his religion taught him of God; but that religion itself 
was a device of man, a vanity and a lie, no help to him in 
the finding of God, but a hindrance rather. 

A rapid oversight of the circumstances under which 
the Samaritan worship came into being, and the conditions 
of its existence at this time, will enable us best to under- 
stand the uncompromising severity of the verdict which the 
lips of truth have just pronounced against it. It is true that 
the upgrowth of the Samaritan worship, with the building 
of the temple on Mount Garizim, which for two hundred 


12 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


years, according to Josephus, but probably for more 
nearly three hundred, was an offence and a provocation to 
those who worshipped on Mount Moriah (the rivalry of 
the religions has survived the destruction of both temples), 
is clothed in much obscurity; yet not so great as to hide 
from us the unreal character which clung to it from the 
first. To regard Samaritanism as in any sense a con- 
tinuation of the schism, political and religious, of the Ten 
Tribes‘ is altogether misleading. It is true, as mentioned 
already, that the Samaritans at a later day claimed their 
descent from the tribe of Ephraim; in which, as they 
affirmed, the true line of God’s promises ran, appealing in 
proof to Gen. xlix. 22-26; Deut. xxxiil. 13-17; and 
ignoring, as some tell us, Hli and Samuel and the house 
of David altogether. But this was an after-thought. 
The only real thread of connection between the two is 
the well-known fact recorded in the Second Book of Kings 
(xvii. 24-28), namely, that when the heathen colonists 
planted by the king of Assyria in the land left desolate 
by the deportation of its Israelitish inhabitants, were 
annoyed in their new seats by lions, these ‘ proselytes of 
the lions,’ as the Jews loved insultingly to call them, 
sought and obtained that a priest from among those who 
had been thus carried away might be sent back to teach 
them ‘the manner of the God of the land,’ hoping so to 
avert his displeasure. But one of Jeroboam’s priests, ἡ 
himself entangled in the idolatries of Dan and Bethel, was 
not likely. to accomplish much, and from the sacred nar- 
rative we gather that he accomplished nothing at all, in 
the way of extirpating the various idolatries which the 
Persian and Median colonists had brought with them 


1 As Witsins does in his Decaphylon, ch. 3, and many more. 


* CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 113 


(ver. 29-41); some of these idolatries surviving in forms 
the most hideous (see ver. 31); however he may have 
managed to combine with these certain outward cere- 
monies, and to impart a knowledge of certain outward 
facts, of the true religion. 

When the children of the Captivity, restored to their 
own land, were engaged in the rebuilding of their temple, 
the Samaritans, as is familiar to all, requested, not on the 
ground of a common nationality, for that they do not 
venture to plead, but as seeking the same God with them, 
to be allowed to share in the work; with, of course, the 
condition understood, that the temple, reared by both, 
should be common to both (Hzra iv. 1-3). The Jews 
refused; and they could not do otherwise. The Jewish 
Church might even then receive proselytes one by one 
into its bosom; but the time of any freer larger adoption 
of the nations was yet far off; and it was God, not man, 
who must determine when the hour for this had arrived. 
For the present their strength lay in their isolation. 
That alone could preserve them from the infinite spiritual 
dangers which surrounded them. Mingling with the 
heathen, or suffering these to mingle with them, they 
would soon have learned their works. The Samaritans 
resent the refusal; put many spiteful hindrances in the 
way of the work; and the seeds of an enmity which has 
lasted to this day, seeds hereafter to spring up in ten 
thousand bitternesses of hate and scorn and wrong on the 
one side and on the other, were sown. 

There are no means of tracing the steps by which the 
Samaritan worship in the course of time eliminated from 
itself the grosser heathen elements which it contained (its 


kernel was heathenish to the last, see ver. 22), or the 
I 


114 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. * 


modifications which it underwent, until at last it became 
so plausible a counterfeit of the truth, that it did not 
hesitate to enter the lists even of theological argument ; 
disputing,—it does so here by the mouth of this woman 
—as to which was the truth, and which the lie. But 
though the several steps of this transformation may be 
out of our power to trace, there was one event, or series 
of events, which must have exercised an enormous in- 
fluence in bringing such a result about, which perhaps 
alone would have made it possible. This was the seces- 
sion from Jerusalem of one or more members of the high- 
priestly family ; accompanied or followed by that of other 
distinguished refugees; who for one cause or another 
driven from Jerusalem, or malcontents quitting it of their’ 
own accord, found refuge and welcome in Samaria, and 
brought a knowledge with them of the Jewish ritual and 
of the Jewish theology to those whose faith and worship 
must till their arrival have been a very poor, maimed, and 
ignorant thing. 

Josephus’ has a story exactly of the kind, which cannot 
indeed pass muster as he tells it; but which yet is gene- 
rally recognized as possessing a foundation of historic 
truth, as the more or less inaccurate version of an 
event recorded thus by Nehemiah: ‘ And one of the sons 
of Joiada, the son of Eliashib the High Priest, was son in 
law to Sanballat the Horonite; therefore I chased him 
from me’ (xiii. 28); or, if not this, to be another event of 
a like character, which in the telling has been more or 
less confused with this. If indeed Josephus refers to the 
same event as Nehemiah, then, besides other mistakes, he 
has placed it some eighty years after the date when it 


1 Antt, XI. 7. 2, and 8, 2. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 115 


really happened. His story is of one Manasses, brother 
of Joiada the High Priest, who about the year B.c. 332, 
was chased from Jerusalem on account of a marriage 
which he had contracted with the daughter of Sanballat, 
the Persian governor of Samaria, and which, when re- 
quired, he refused to dissolve. He was received with 
open arms by his father in law, who undertook to rear for 
him on Mount Garizim, the highest mountain in Samaria, 
a temple more magnificent than that from which he had 
been driven; where he should himself exercise the office 
of High Priest. The worship there was in this way set 
on a far more formidable footing than it had _ before 
attained; not to say that the secession, once begun, was 
presently reinforced by other fugitives and apostates, 
many of them priests, who, now that a rallying point and a 
refuge was prepared for them, fell away as Manasses had 
done. Such is the story of Josephus ; not without serious 
inaccuracies, but having also some substratum of truth. 
The temple thus reared was destroyed by John Hyrcanus 
B.C. 129;* but the worship continued on Mount Garizim, 
which by this time the Samaritans had learned to regard 
as the holiest mountain in the world,? some sort of 
edifice no doubt occupying the place of the temple which 
had disappeared. Nor could the imitation have been a 
contemptible one; else it could never have excited the 
intense jealousy which evidently among the Jews it did 
excite. Everything in fact may have been there,—except 

“Ant, ἘΠῚ δ. τ}. Εν 011, 2: 6. 

5 Josephus (Anté. xvi. 4. 1): Γαριζεὶν͵ ὁ ἁγνότατον αὐτοῖς ὀρῶν ὑπείληπται. 

* A story recorded by Josephus (Antt. x1. 3. 4) is singularly illustra- 
tive of the fierceness with which the rival claims of Jerusalem and Garizim 
were debated, not on these spots merely, but wherever Jew and Samaritan 


encountered. Certain of the one religion and of the other at Alexandria 


besought Ptolemy Philometor to decide which were in the right, pledging 
12 


116 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


the presence of God. There was but one flaw, but that 
was a fatal one: ‘ Ye worship ye know not what. . 

But if thus with them, it was very different with the 
Jews: ‘ We know what we worship’.(Rom. iii. 2; Luke 
Xvi. 29), ‘for salvation is of the Jews’ (Isai. ii. 3; Gen. xii. 
2,3; Zech. vill. 23; Mic. iv. 2). This ‘ salvation, where 
we should beforehand have expected Him to be named who 
was the Author of that salvation, the Saviour (cf. Rom. 
ix. 5), this abstract for the concrete, may remind us of 
exactly the same language on the lips of the aged Simeon, 
‘for mine eyes have seen thy salvation’ (τὸ σωτήριον 
there), uttered at a moment when he held the infant” 
Saviour in his arms (Luke ii. 30), and of the words of the 
dying Jacob, ‘I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord’ 
(Gen. xlix. 18). Because salvation was thus of the Jews, 
therefore they knew what they worshipped,’ and not vice 
versd, because they knew what they worshipped, there- 
fore salvation was of them. He who set them to minister 
salvation to the world, as a necessary condition of this 
gave them to know Himself, whom they must first know 
before they could declare to others. 

But this declaration of our Lord’s, quite irrespective 
of its bearing on the controversy between the rival 
Churches, is very important as setting the seal of his abso- 
lute authority on the Jewish institutions as divine, di- 
rectly appointed of God for the bringing of mankind to 
the knowledge of his Name. Wherever Christ’s words are 


him beforehand to put to death those against whom his decision should be 
given. He solemnly heard their several pleadings and proofs alleged; which 
done, he decided, as he could not do otherwise, in favour of the Jews, slay- 
ing, according to the request and agreement made, the advocates of Garizim. 

‘So rightly Lampe: In expectatione enim hujus salutis totus cultus 
Mosaicus fundatus erat. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN, 117 


accepted as rule and law, these words of his, spoken by the 
well of Jacob, will vindicate for Israel in that period 
which went before the Incarnation a position altogether 
different from that of every other nation of the earth. 
Israel was the channel through which the salvation of 
God should be conveyed to the world. It was the aloe 
tree, in many aspects unsightly enough, but which yet 
should blossom at last in one ‘ bright consummate flower,’ 
and having so fulfilled its mission should then wither and 
die.’ Doubtless there were, as the illustrious Alexan- 
drian teachers loved to trace, preparations for Christ going 
forward in the Gentile world, as well as within the limits 
of the Jewish Church; that had its προπαιδεία too; but 
in many respects this was negative rather than posi- 
tive ; and even where positive, it was very far from being 
that direct immediate discipline, nurture, and training 
which was their exclusive privilege, ‘ of whom as concern- 
ing the flesh Christ should come, who is over all, God 
blessed for ever’ (Rom. ix. 5). 

Christ has spoken already of the where men shall wor- 
ship the Father, that it shall be ‘ necther in this mountain, 
nor yet at Jerusalem, but everywhere (cf. 1 Tim. ii. 8; 
Zeph. iii. 11) ; He proceeds to speak (having disposed by 
way of parenthesis of the question moved by the woman), 
of the how: ‘The hour cometh, and now is, when the true 
worshippers shall worship the Father’ in spiritand in truth; 
Sor the Father secketh such to worship Him. The ‘now is’ 
declares that this is a future which has already com- 
menced. The dispensation of the Spirit, in which God the 


* Augustine (De Civ. Dei, xvii. 11): Ipse Jesus substantia populi ejus, ex 
quo natura est carnis ejus. 

* Grotius: Tacite Novi Federis suavitatem innuit, cum Deum Patrem 
yocat, Rom. viii. 15; Gal. iv. 16. 


18 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


Spirit shall be spiritually worshipped is not merely some- 
thing which is to be hereafter; she stands already upon 
its threshold.’ Prophesied of long since (Jer. ili. 16; 
Hagg. 11. 7-10; Zeph. iii. g; Isai. xlv. 23), it has now 
actually begun (cf. v. 25). As an immediate consequence 
of this, a very slight one, compared with the far more 
momentous which the fact involves, she shall not need to 
mend her present erroneous faith by betaking her to Jeru- 
salem, instead of to Garizim. The time for this is over. 
We shall best understand what this worshipping ‘in 
spirit and in trutl’ means, if we deal with these statements 
one by one, only afterwards considering the relation in 
which they stand to one another. And first, ‘2 spirit.’ St. 
Paul speaks of himself and those of ‘ the true circumcision,’ 
corresponding to the ‘¢rue worshippers’ of this passage, as 
worshipping ‘in the Spirit of God’ (Phil. ii. 3); of the 
Spirit helping our infirmities (Rom. viii. 26); St. Jude of 
‘ praying in the Holy Ghost’ (ver. 20); this being the divine 
element and sphere in which prayer has its rise, and in 
which it moves. It will follow that only there, where the 
mystery of the New Birth has found place, will this con- 
dition of a true worship be fulfilled. In his fallen nature 
man is not spirit, but flesh (Gen. vi. 3). Latent and sup- 
pressed, overlayed by the flesh, utterly unable to extricate 
itself from the superincumbent load, there is a spirit in 
him, an organ, that is, for the reception of the divine 
Spirit, and one which by that Spirit may be quickened 
into the activities of prayer and worship. Little as this 
neophyte in the school of Christ may have understood of 
all this, she will yet have gathered from that utterance 
of his, still more plainly from a word which is presently to 
follow (ver. 24), that a living God must be worshipped ina 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 119 


living manner, by that which is highest and best in man, 
and by that informed and quickened by a breath or Spirit 
of his own. 

He adds, ‘ and in truth. Where the Spirit is, there is 
the truth; He, as the Spirit of truth, excluding not merely 
all the grosser falsehoods of the heathen religions, but all 
subtle self-delusions in which worshippers who are not 
‘true’ may be so easily entangled ; as the service of the lips 
offered instead of the service of the heart (Ps. 1. 16; Isai. 
xxix.13; Matt. xv.8); with all substitutions of the out- 
ward for the inward, as of bullocks and goats in place of 
thanksgivings and paying of vows (Ps. 1. 8-11); thousands 
of rams and rivers of oil in lieu of justice and mercy and 
a humble walking with God (Mic. vi. 7,8). Nor does 
the worshipping ‘ ἐγ ¢ruth’ exclude only what is false. 
Tt excludes also what as worship is partial, rudimentary, 
imperfect. Those whom God enables to worship must 
have passed through the lower and more imperfect stages 
of a religious training, have left behind them types and 
shadows, elements of this world, have been by the Spirit 
introduced into the world of spiritual realities, and must 
now be moving and acting in 10. ‘ The law came by Moses, 
but grace and truth by Jesus Christ’ (John i. 17). In 
these words, upon which the whole Epistle to the He- 
brews may be said to be an extended commentary, there 
is a clear antithesis between the Mosaic law, with all 
Levitical institutions, and the ‘ truth.’ Not antagonjstic, 
which God forbid, they are yet distinct from one another. 
One has ‘a shadow of good things to come,’ the other 

1 Augustine: Foras ieramus, intro missi sumus. Intus age totum. Et 
si forte queeris aliquem locum altum, aliquem locum sanctum, intus exhibe 


te terplum Dei. In templo vis orare, in te ora. Sed prius esto templum 
Dei, quia ille in templo suo exaudiet orantem. 


120 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


‘the very image’ (εἰχών) ‘of the things’ (Heb. x. 1). 
The earlier may have, and has, prophetic outlines» typical 
preformations ; ‘ but the body’ (σῶμα---ἀληθεία here) ‘is of 
Christ’ (Col. 1.7). What to ‘worship in truth’ is, this 
the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews has exactly de- 
clared: ‘Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter 
into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and 
living way, which He hath consecrated for us, through 
the veil, that is to say, his flesh ; and having a High Priest 
over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart 
in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled 
from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure 
water’ (x. 19—-22).' 

‘God is a Spirit.’ Expositors have sometimes sought 
to go very deep into the meaning of these words, to find 
in them metaphysical announcements concerning the 
nature of God. Doubtless they are of an infinite depth ; 
but that exquisite saying of Gregory the Great’s,’ that 
Scripture has depths for an elephant to swim in and 
shallows which a lamb can wade, is capable of being 
pushed a little further. Oftentimes the same Scripture 
is at once a depth for one and a shallow for another, 


* Keeping in mind that Christ has said elsewhere ‘I am the Truth’ 
(John xiv. 6), we shall scarcely err if to what has been said we further add 
—and many of the Fathers engaged in controversy with the Arians have 
here shown us the way,—that we have the whole mystery of the Trinity 
in these words declared to us, the Father to be worshipped, as He only can 
be worshipped, in the Spirit and the Truth. So Athanasius; Basil the 
Great, in a passage full οἵ the deepest theology, De Spir. Sancto, 26; and 
Ambrose, De Spir. Sancto, ili. 11, 81. 

* On these words see a remarkably able article by Ackermann in the 
Theol. Stud. und Krit. 1839, pp. 873-944, Ueber πνεῦμα, vac, und Geist. 
It deals pp. 940-9 -} with this verse. 

5 At least I have never traced it higher than the prefatory Epistle to his 
Commentary on Job : Divinus etenimn sermo sicut mysteriis prudentes exercet, 
sic plerumque superficie simplices refovet. Quasi quidam quippe est fluvius, 
ut ita dixerim, planus et altus, in quo et agnus ambulet et elephas natet. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 121 


and thus is it here. We should do little honour to the 
Lord’s skill in teaching, his adaptation of his words to 
the needs of his hearers, if, seeking after high things, we 
failed to find in these words some simple truth, such as 
that poor ignorant woman with whom He talked was 
capable of grasping, and such as at that moment she 
needed. ‘ God is a Spirit ;—we must not miss, assuredly 
she did not miss, the significant image on which this 
word (spiritus from spirare, as πνεῦμα from πρνέω), 
reposes ; like the wind therefore, to which He is likened, 
breathing and blowing where He will, penetrating every- 
where, owning no circumscriptions, tied to no place, 
neither to Mount Zion nor to Mount Garizim; but rather 
filling all space with his presence (Ps. cxxxix. 7; 1 Kin. 
vili. 27; Isai. Ixvi. 1), in his essence and, as involved in 
this very title, free. On this it follows that ‘they who 
worship Him, must worship Him in spirit and in truth’—on 
all which there has been already occasion to speak. 

How far, we may fitly pause for a moment to enquire, 
does a declaration like this of the spiritual character of 
all true worship exclude forms, how far does it allow 
them? That it has not been counted to exclude them, 
the practice of the Church in all ages sufficiently declares. 
At the same time it must be accepted as, in the first place, 
stamping on them a subordinate and secondary character. 
They may be henceforth the vehicles of devotion; they 
can never in the New Covenant themselves constitute 
devotion. Then too, secondly, it is plain that there is 
allowance here for only so much of these as there is a 
reasonable expectation can be taken up and quickened 

* It need hardly be remarked that in the Hebrew or Aramaic, which the 
Lord in all likelihood spoke with this woman, the identity ‘of spirit, breath, 
and wind is quite as strongly marked. 


122 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


by the Spirit which is in the worshippers. So soon as 
ever they are in excess of this, directly they overlay the 
inner life, instead of setting it forth, are present for their 
own sakes, and not for the sake of something of which ἡ 
they are the bearers, directly they tempt men to stop 
short with them, instead of passing and pressing through 
them to Him who is behind them all, they are of the 
things which Christ intended here to exclude. The 
idiosyncrasies of men, of nations, of the same people at 
different epochs of its spiritual growth, are so various that it 
can never be easy to fix the exact point where what should 
nave been a help is in danger of becoming a hindrance. 
So long as man even at his best estate is at once weak 
and sinful, it will be always an alternative of dangers. 
On the one side, though worshipping One who is Spirit, 
he is not himself all spirit; but body and spirit; and 
‘as such craves a certain body for his devotions (a 
‘spiritual body’ it should be), cannot afford for long not 
to find one; the wine of devotion, having no vessels to 
hold it, will inevitably be spilt and lost. On the other 
hand, entirely lawful concessions to this just craving of the 
human heart may be turned into occasions of mischief. 
Over and over again God had need to cast a slight on his 
own temple-worship, its gifts and its sacrifices, when these 
had become not means any longer, but ends, to his 
people; not helps to bring them into his presence, but 
substitutes for that presence. And if that which was of 
divine appointment was itself thus liable to abuse, how 
much more that which is of man’s devising. But it is 
impossible in a matter like this to do more than lay down 
the principle which should guide in rejecting or allowing. 
Nowhere will prudence, charity, mutual forbearance, be 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 123 


more needed than in the application of this principle ; for 
wherever the line is drawn, it is certain that some will 
have to tolerate more of forms than they think desirable, 
and others to put up with less. 

Something this poor sinner understands, but not much, 
of what has just been said to her. He with whom she 
speaks has brought her into deep waters, deeper than 
any in which she can find a footing, transported her 
into a sphere of truths far larger than she can grasp. 
This setting aside at once and for ever of the controversy 
between her people and his people, as something of no 
future interest whatever, this setting forth to her of an- 
other Father beside that ‘ father Jacob,’ this worship in 
spirit and in truth, there is that in her which dimly and 
obscurely responds to it all. We may take her words 
which follow, ‘Z know that Messias cometh, which is called 
Christ ; when He is come, He will tell us all things’*—as 
a cry of helplessness. ‘I see not my way in this new 
world into which Thou hast brought me; but one is 
coming, the Messias, the Prophet promised to our fathers ; 
I can only wait in confidence that He will lead us into all 
truth, tell us all which it most concerns us to know.’ At 
the same time there pierces through her words, as it seems 
to me, a timid presage and presentiment, such as she 
hardly dares own, much less ventures to utter, ‘Thou 
perhaps art He whom we look for.’ 

The word ‘Messias’ occurs only twice in the New 
Testament; here, and in Andrews announcement to 
his brother Peter, of the Saviour whom he has found 


‘ There are two curious examples of this same adjourning of perplexed and 
difficult questions to the decision of a prophet that should come hereafter 
in the Maccabeean times (1 Mace. iv. 46; xiv. 41). 


124 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


(John i. 41). It is there explained by the Evangelist as 
‘being interpreted, The Christ,’ or The Anointed; the title 
being drawn first from Ps. ii. 2; xix. 7 (xx. 6. Εἰ. V.); and 
then from Dan. ix. 25, 26. It is exceedingly difficult to 
say whether ‘ which is called Christ, is here also an inter- 
calation of the Evangelist, or a part of her designation of 
the Saviour whom she looks for. That St. John has ex- 
plained ‘ Messias’ once does not make it the least unlikely 
that he should explain it again; for see xi. 16; xx. 243 
Xxi. 2; indeed the fact that he has done so before leads 
me on the whole to conclude that he is doing so again, 
and that these words are not the woman’s, though they 
would have fitted in very well to her speech, but the 
Evangelist’s. As neither Psalms nor Prophets were ac- 
cepted by the Samaritans, the name ‘ Messias’ must have 
made its way to them from the theological schools of the 
Jews. With the exception of the name, there is nothing 
in their expectation of the Messiah which she might not 
have derived from that Pentateuch, which and which 
only, as is familiar to all, the Samaritans received. To 
this day they mainly ground their expectations of a 
Messiah on Deut. xviii. 1 5—19—a true foreshewing of Him ; 
but at the same time, if taken alone, a most meagre and 
inadequate one, as giving no hint either of his kingly or 
priestly office, but of his prophetic only ; even, as it will 
be observed, it is only prophetic functions which she 
ascribes to Him here." 

It is not a little remarkable that our Lord, who so 
carefully concealed from the multitude of his Jewish 


‘The rise of at least one false Christ about this same time, or a little 
later, among the Samaritans—I refer in particular to Dositheus,—is evidence 
that Messias-hopes and expectations were stirring among them no less tham 
among the Jews. 


CHRIST AND THH SAMARITAN WOMAN. 125 


followers the fact of His Messiahship, beyond the circle 
of his own disciples revealing it but to one (John ix. 31), 
who so strictly charged the disciples themselves that they 
should not make Him known (Matt. xvi. 20), sealing with 
the seal of absolute silence the lips of the three who had 
been witnesses of his Transfiguration (Matt. xvii. g; Mark 
ix. 9); does yet here announce Himself without reserve to 
this Samaritan woman, and not to her only, but to the 
Samaritans in general during his brief sojourn among 
them, so that before He quits them they confess, ‘ Zhis cs 
indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world’ (ver. 42). And 
yet the different dealing in the different circumstances is 
intelligible enough. One of our Lord’s chief difficulties 
during the whole course of his ministry among his own 
people was to keep that ministry clear of political excite- 
ments, to avoid rousing those turbulent expectations 
of a change in their outer condition, which the Jewish 
multitude associated most closely with the coming of 
Messiah. Thus so soon as ever these supposed that they 
beheld such in Him, they sought, we are told, ‘to take 
Him by force, and to make Him a king’ (John vi. 15), to 
carry Him away with them and instal Him at once as 
King Messiah at Jerusalem—He to avoid this being 
obliged to conceal Himself from them; even as nothing 
would have so effectually marred and brought to ruin 
his whole work as any attempt of the kind, and this 
whether it were defeated at once, or crowned with a tem- 
porary success. There were other reasons, no doubt, 
which will help to explain why Luther’s work abode, 
and Savonarola’s came to nothing; yet this, no doubt, 
was a chief reason, namely that Luther’s was a Church 
Reformation and nothing else, leaving any other to follow, 


126 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


as follow in its own good time it must; while that of the 
Italian friar would fain have been a Reformation of the 
Church and State in one. But the Samaritan expectation 
of a Messiah, if in some respects weaker and feebler, was 
yet mingled with far fewer disturbing elements; not to 
say that the acceptance of a Jewish Messiah upon their 
parts could arouse no worldly hopes or expectations in 
their hearts; nay rather must sound the death-knell of 
any proud hopes for their nation which they hitherto 
may have cherished, and caused them to bid a lasting 
farewell to these.! To them, to this woman, and after- 
wards to her fellow-countrymen, He could declare Him- 
self without fear of the consequences, and He did so: “7 
that speak with thee am He.” What a glorious fulfilment 
this of Isai. Ixv. 1: ‘I said, Behold Me, behold Me, unto 
a nation that was not called by my name.’ 

‘And upon this, came his disciples and marvelled that 
He talked with the woman.* The oriental contempt of 
woman speaks out very strongly in the sayings of the 
Jewish Rabbis, and at this time the disciples had not 


> Godet (Commentaire sur l’ Evangile de S. Jean): Quelle contraste entre 
la notion du Messie telle que l’exprime cette femme [ver. 25], et les notions 
charnelles et de nature toute politique que Jésus rencontrait sans cesse en 
Israél sur ce sujet! Sans doute l’élément royal manque 4 la notion samari- 
taine du Messie. Mais combien l’absence de cet élément n’est-elle pas 
préférable ἃ Valtération profonde qu’il avait subie chez les Juifs! L’idée est 
incompléte, mais non pas fausse; et voila pourquoi Jésus peut se Pappliquer, 
et se dire ici le Christ, ce qu’il n’a fait en Israél qu’au dernier moment 
(xvii. 3; Matt. xxvi. 64). 

3 Let it be permitted to adapt to this poor bondwoman of sin, at this blessed 
crisis of her life, words written long before concerning another bondwoman, 
when grace, though far lower grace than this, was vouchsafed also to her: 
καὶ ἀνέῳξεν ὁ Θεὸς τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτῆς, καὶ εἶδε φρέαρ ὕδατος ζῶντος (Gen. 
XX, 19): 

3 There are some beautiful remarks on Christ’s relations to women, and 
the influence He exerted on them, in Guizot’s Meditations on the Essence of 
Christianity, Highth Meditation, p. 281, English translation. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 127 


themselves unlearned it. Yet while they marvelled, they 
were at the same time hindered by respect and awe from 
expressing their surprise: ‘Yet no man said, What seekest 
Thou? or, Why talkest Thou with her?’ None ventured to 
ask the reason of this unusual conversation (John xxi. 12). 
Evidently it never entered into their thoughts that what 
He was asking from her was fer faith; that what He 
was talking about with her was the worship of the Father 
in spirit and in truth. Meanwhile the woman, availing 
herself of their arrival, which naturally caused a pause 
and break in the conversation, quits the spot—but this 
in the hope that she may presently return again, and not 
return alone. 

As a sort of pledge of this her return, or perhaps rather 
in the forgetfulness of a great joy, ‘ she left her water-pot, 
as apostles before her had left their nets (Matt. iv. 20); so 
soon has she learned to prefer the water which Christ 
gives to the fountain which Jacob gave; ‘and went her 
way into the city, and saith unto the men, Come, see a man, 
which told me all things that ever I did” Little as she 
could have desired at other times to direct attention to 
the events of a life which could ill bear any very close 
inspection, all shame of this kind is for the present over- 
borne and swallowed up in feelings of wonder and of joy. 
This ‘all things that ever I did’ must, of course, be taken 
as the exaggeration of one still lost in amazement at that 
marvellous revelation of the leading outlines and so many 
of the mournful secrets of her past history. It is with 
her now as with him whom St. Paul contemplates as 
coming into the Christian assembly, who is there ‘ con- 
vinced of all, and judged of all; and thus are the secrets 
of his heart made manifest, and so falling down on his 


128 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


face, he will worship God, and report that God is in you 
of a truth’ (1 Cor. xiv. 24, 25). Such a judgment, and 
one still higher, she has formed of Him who had thus 
made manifest the.secrets of her heart and life: ‘ Js not 
this the Christ?’ A more accurate rendering of her 
question, ‘ Whether is this the Christ?, would not really 
alter the meaning; only instead of seeking to force her 
own conviction on those whom she addresses, she will be 
rather putting it to them to judge, and to draw con- 
clusions of their own. The character of this woman, the 
scandals of whose life must have been sufficiently notorious, 
can have added no particular weight to the announce- 
ment which she now made, or to the invitations to her 
fellow-townsmen which she gave; yet her evident earnest- 
ness, with the strength of her own convictions lending 
force to her words, overbears all other considerations. 
They do not hesitate, but at her invitation ‘they went out 
of the city, and came unto Him.’ 

In the interval between her departure and their arrival 
a short but deeply interesting discourse between the Lord 
and his disciples has found place. We know from ver. 8 
that ‘his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy 
meat. They have prepared the food which they had 
bought, and now they ‘prayed Him, saying, Master, eat.’ 
But since then a higher spiritual joy has suspended all 
sense of a lower bodily necessity : ‘ I have meat to eat that 
ye know not of. Let them eat; but for Himself He 
needs not this earthly sustenance.’ As his thirst had been 
not so much after the water of Jacob’s well as after her 
conversion who had come to draw water thence, so now 


1 This is no doubt the force of that ἐγὼ βρῶσιν ἔχω, in which He tacitly 
distinguishes Himself who needed not, from them who needed, this food. 


OHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 129g 


his hunger is not for the food which they have prepared, 
but for those whom He beholds already hastening from 
the neighbouring city, that they may hear and receive 
his word. The disciples, perplexed, can only suppose 
that supplies have been brought Him from some quarter 
of which they are ignorant: ‘ They say one to another, 
Hath any man brought Him aught to eat ?? He explains his 
meaning, and of what meat He is speaking : ‘ My meat is to 
do the will of Him that sent Me’' (cf. Ps. xl. 8); this was 
the ‘hidden manna’ that He spake of, ‘sweeter,’ as the 
Psalmist long before had said, ‘than honey and the 
honeycomb’ (Ps. xix. 10; exix. 103); ‘and to finish” his 
work.’ With such zeal did He set Himself to the carrying 
through of this, which his Father had set Him to accom- 
plish, that a little later He could say, ‘I have finished the 
work which Thou gavest Me to do’ (John xvii. 4). In 
these words there is involved an answer to that question 
of theirs, which they longed, but did not venture, to put to 
Him, namely, why ‘He talked with the woman. They could 
not now fail to understand that his conversation with her 
had no trivial motive, that it was for the winning of her into 
that kingdom of grace which his Father had sent Him into 
this world, and anointed Him with the Spirit, at once to 
declare and to found (Isai. 1Χ]. 1-3). If any doubt ex- 
isted on this point, the words which follow (ver. 35-38), 


1 One of the Apocryphal Gospels, the Protevangelium Jacobi Minoris, c. i. 
_ supplies an interesting parallel. Joachim, the father of the Blessed Virgin, 
retiring to tbe wilderness, declares his resolve to fast there till God shall 
grant him his heart’s desire; καὶ ἔσται μοι ἡ εὐχὴ βρῶμα καὶ πόμα. 

5 Lampe: Vox τελειόω, a τέλος, designat non solum opus ad finem ducere, 
sed etiam ita, ut actu omnes illas partes et qualitates habeat, que ad opus 
illud requirebantur, atque adeo ut respondeat secundum omnes partes su@ 
delineationi, suoque scopo, cui est destinatum (Act. xx. 24; Jac. ii. 22; 
1 Joh. ii. 5; iv. 12, 17, 18). 


K 


130 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


difficult though in some details they are to us, would 
have removed it. 

The passage, I have just said, is difficult—more so, as it 
seems to me, thanis generally recognized, and almost every 
explanation of it is encumbered with its own embarrass- 
ments. However satisfactory an explanation may prove 
in one part, it is almost sure to be forced and artificial in 
another. There is always something unreal in the going 
off into general observations on the relations between the 
spiritual sower and the spiritual reaper. What we almost 
always seem to want is some explanation which shall more 
closely attach these verses to the events which at the moment 
are actually going forward, and on which these words are 
a commentary. The interpretation which follows appears 
to me to possess this recommendation. And first, the Lord 
reminds his disciples of some words which, no doubt, had 
lately fallen from their lips, as they looked out on that 
broad expanse of corn-land, which, as modern travellers 
assure us, stretches out before the eyes of one who stands, 
as they stood, beside Jacob’s well: ‘Say not ye, There 
are yet four months, and then cometh harvest ?’? So it may 
be in the harvest of nature; but in the harvest of grace 
there is a quicker ripening than this: ‘ Behold, I say 
unto you, Lift up your eyes (cf. Gen. xiii. 14, 15), and look 
on the fields, for they are white already to harvest’ (cf. 
Isai. xlix. 18; Ix. 4). That they may understand of what 
harvest He is speaking, He directs their attention to the 
multitude already covering the space that lays between 
the city and the place where they stood, and who were 
only waiting, so to speak, to be gathered into the heavenly 
garners. 

He proceeds to encourage his disciples to a work thus 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 131 


made ready to their hands, addresses to them an exhorta- 
tion, the same which the prophet Joel had addressed to 
others long before: ‘ Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest 
is ripe’ (iii. 13); but he bidding to a harvest of death, 
Christ to a harvest of life: ‘and he that reapeth receweth 
wages,—or better, receiveth a reward,'—‘ and gathereth 
Fruit unto life eternal” Here is a twofold magnifying of the 
spiritual reaper’s office; he has his own reward, by anti- 
cipation and in part upon earth; he has it in full fruition 
in heaven; and, in addition to this, he ministers salvation 
to others; for this ‘gathereth fruit unto life eternal’ I 
cannot understand, with Hengstenberg and others, layeth 
up a further and heavenly reward for himself; for the 
‘fruit’ (καρπός) is identical with the ‘ harvest’ (θερισμός), 
and any interpretation which separates them brings con- 
fusion into the whole passage; cf. Matt. xiii. 30; ili. 12. 
His work, then, having these two promises, is neither an 
ill-requited nor a mean one; not ill-requited, for he 
receives a reward; nor mean, for his harvest is of souls, 
which shall be saved through Christ for ever.? But 
why has the Lord of the harvest thus graciously brought 
to this early ripeness that harvest now spread forth before 
their eyes? The answer follows: ‘that both he that 


* Μισθός͵ a word not seldom used for that ‘reward’ which of free grace 
God reserves for His servants here and hereafter, Matt. v. 12; x. 41, 42; 
1 Oor. iii. 8, 14; 2 John viii. 

* Juvencus in the following lines, which are a favourable specimen of 
his poetry, gives, as it seems to me, the right explanation (Hvang. Hist. ii. 
313): 

Quatuor hinc menses lat# ad primordia messis 
Frugiferss «statis certe superesse putatis. 

Erigite ergo oculos, albentes cernite campos, 
Cunctaque maturam jam rura exposcere messem. 
Nunc quicunque metet, pulchri mercede laboris, 
Vitalique dehine gaudebit fruge redundans, 

Et sator accipiet messorum gaudia letus. 


K 2 


12 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


soweth, and he that reapeth, may rejoice together. Here 
the emphasis must lie on the concluding word, ‘ together’ 
Seldom indeed can this be the case. There is too often 
an interval, not seldom a long and dreary one, between a 
sowing and a reaping time. Often before the reaping 
time has arrived, the sower is in his grave. If both of 
them rejoice, yet seldom is it one and the same jubilee 
which they celebrate together, such as that which Christ 
announced that He is now about to celebrate in common 
with His disciples. 

‘And herein, —in that which has just happened and is 
happening,—‘ zs that saying true, the proverb approves 
itself to be a genuine one, finding its fulfilment, as a pro- 
verb worthy of the name will do, in the actual events of 
life, ‘ One soweth and another reapeth.’ There is no 
exception in the present instance to the general law, that 
men enter on the labours of their predecessors. ‘ You,’ 
the Lord would say, ‘are about to enter upon mine.’ 
This monition shall keep them humble, whatever suc- 
cesses may await them. ‘ You desired just now to know 
why I talked with the woman, what I could have been 
seeking from her. I was a sower then, you shall be 
reapers in the harvest which from that sowing has so 
quickly sprung up. J sent you to reap that whereon ye 
bestowed no labour.’ We best understand this past, “7 
sent you’ (ἀπέστειλα), by supposing our Lord to travel 

1 The words in the Ajax of Sophocles, 645, 


ἀλλ᾽ ἔστ᾽ ἀληθὴς ἡ βροτῶν παροιμία, 

ἐχθρῶν ἄδωρα δῶρα, κοὐκ ὀνήσιμα, 
are not exactly parallel. Ajax there affirms the proverb which he cites to 
contain a maxim, not false, but true, therefore ἀληθής : our Lord affirms this 
saying which He has cited to be a genwine one, to be ἀληθινός, such as 
deserves to pass muster, and to take its place among the recognized sayings 
of men. 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 133 


back in thought, and to plant Himself, as He speaks, at 
the moment when He first gave them their commission, 
sent them forth as ambassadors of his grace, labourers in 
his harvest field.* ‘Other men laboured, and ye are 
entered into their labours. This plural, ‘other men,’ or 
‘others, as it would be better rendered, must not lead us 
astray, as it has led so many, and induce us to refer this 
to the prophets and other principal labourers in the older 
Covenant, who underwent their hard apprenticeship under 
the Law (Gal. iv. 3; Acts xv. 10); as though the anti- 
thesis were between them and the apostles of the New. 
It is rather between Christ Himself and his apostles; 
between the Master and the servants, not between two 
different companies of the servants. He is the sower, they 
are the reapers; and as compared with his labours, theirs 
might be esteemed as none at all. What a glimpse have 
we here of the travail of his soul in the redemption of 
mankind—when He who certainly would not underrate 
what his servants wrought for Him, nor forget any labour 
of their love (Rev. il. 2, 3), could yet speak in such a 
language as this ; all this labour and all this toil of theirs 
quite disappearing from his sight, when brought side to 
side with his own.” Truly He trod the winepress alone; 
and of this He counts it good to remind them at the 
present moment, who were about to share with Him 
in the triumphs of the time. 


‘So when the Samaritans were come unto Him, they 


* Lampe: Utitur tempore praterito, Ego misi vos, quia missio eorum a 
vocatione Christi incipiebat, licet deinceps complementum suum acceperit. 

* We may profitably bring together, we were probably meant to bring 
together, the κεκοπιάκασιν of this ver. 38, and the ὁ οὖν ᾿Ιησοῦς κεκοπιακώς of 
ver. 6. 


134 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


besought Him that He would tarry with them. While 
orthodox Jews besought Him that He would depart out 
of their coasts (Matt. viii. 34), drove Him with violence 
(Luke iv. 29), or plotted to scare Him by fraud (Luke 
ΧΙ]. 31, 32), from among them, poor heretical Samaritans 
make it their petition that He would tarry with them; so 
have the first become last, and the last first. Nor did 
they make this petition in vain. Although during his 
earthly ministry sent only to the lost sheep of the house 
of Israel, so that his personal contact with any other was 
exceptional, and in one way or other was noted as such, 
‘ He abode there two days. Assuredly these days were in- 
finitely precious to many—He during them preparing their 
hearts for that glad and free acceptance of the message of 
the Gospel, which after his resurrection it is recorded that 
Philip found in ‘a city of Samaria’ (Acts viii. §), it is 
difficult not to think in this city, the headquarters of the 
Samaritan worship—and, as it would seem, ‘in many vil- 
lages of the Samaritans’ as well (ver. 25). Nor were these 
days of preparation only. This, as He has intimated 
already, was a sowing time and a reaping time all in one 
—the two drawn into marvellous nearness with one 
another. The Evangelist gives us assurance of this, in- 
forming us as He does, that ‘ many more believed because 
of his word ; and these, having believed, ‘ said unto the 
woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying; for 
we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed 
the Christ, the Saviour of the world’ St. John loves to 
mark the advancing steps of faith, and how those who 
believe come to believe more strongly, pass on from faith 
to faith, from a weaker to a firmer, from a lower to a 
higher; compare ii. 11; xvi. 30; xx. 8. This speech of 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 135 


her fellow-townsmen to the woman has nothing rude or 
offensive’ about it, rather, indeed, the contrary : ‘ We set 
our own seals to the truth of thy report. We have heard 
Him ourselves, the gracious words which He speaks, the 
authority with which He speaks them; He has so com- 
mended Himself to us, with such demonstration of the 
truth, that we bow to his claims, and, quite irrespective of 
any witness of thine, take Him for what He avouches 
Himself to be, the Christ, the Saviour of the world. 

The fact that the Scripture allows and accepts this 
confession of theirs, sees in it not an act of credulity but 
of faith, and this, notwithstanding the very slight external 
proofs which to them He could have produced, attesting and 
making good his pretensions to be the Messiah, is very in- 
structive. It is an evidence that the Scripture ascribes to 
man a spiritual organ for the recognition of the highest 
truth, when this is presented to him; that it regards the 
truth,—and Christ is the Truth (John xiv. 6), 
motos, visible by its own light, and carrying its own con- 


Saye 
as αὐτὸ- 


viction with it. In all this matter the woman may be 
said to have fulfilled for her fellow-countrymen the office 
which the Church fulfils for her children. She too wit- 
nesses of Christ; and then those brought to Him through 
this witness find in Him such fulness of grace and truth, 
that they set to their own seals that He is the Christ, and 
have another and a better witness of this in themselves.’ 


1 Some indeed have urged that λαλιά, by which the Samaritans describe 
the report of the woman, is properly garrulous talk; thus Calvin: Videntur 
jactare Samaritani sibi solidius jam esse fulerum quam in lingué mulieris, 
que ut plurimum futilis esse solet. But λαλιά has no such slighting usage 
in Scripture ; at John viii. 43 it is ascribed to Christ. 

3 Grotius: Notdrunt veteres in hic Samaritidi Ecclesiw esse figuram,, 
que nos adducit ad verbum divinum; nos verbo, maxime propter ipsius. 
majestatem et sanctitatem, credimus. Confer 1 Reg. x. 6, 7. 


136 CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 


This is the only occasion on which the phrase, ‘Saviour 
of the world, appears in the Gospels, as only once else- 
where in the New Testament, namely, in the First Epistle 
of St. John (iv. 14; cf. 1 Tim. iv. 10). Remarkably 
enough, though when we look a little closer most naturally, 
it occurs first on the lips of these Samaritan converts. 
Such language, with the mighty truth which was bound 
up with it, was still a long way off from Jewish thought, 
had not as yet risen above the horizon in the minds of 
apostles themselves; for these, even after the Resurrec- 
tion itself, demanded, ‘ Wilt Thou at this time restore 
again the kingdom to Israel?’ (Acts i. 6; cf. Luke i. 68-- 
79; xxiv. 21) by their question testifying that their 
horizon reached no further than this, that this restoration 
was the ultimate limit of their hopes; even as the first 
half of the Book of Acts gives evidence how slowly, with 
how many reluctancies on the part of some, it broke upon 
their minds that theirs was a commission as wide as the 
world, that their risen Lord was not King of Israel only, 
but ‘ Saviour of the world’ as well. 

Many circumstances made the reception of this truth 
easier to Samaritans. When they had once accepted 
Jesus as the Messiah, there was every inducement at work 
in their minds to contemplate Him not so much this King 
of Israel, as the Saviour of the world. From his lips 
they no doubt had learned, as the woman who first 
brought them to Him had learned, that their pretensions 
as the seed of Abraham were utterly baseless, that only 
as He was this Saviour of all men could they have any 
part or lot in Him.’ The Jew might cling to his exclusive 


‘Calvin: Colligimus Evangelii summam intra biduum familiarius illis 
fuisse a Christo traditum, quam hactenus Hierosolyme fuisset. Et Christus 


CHRIST AND THE SAMARITAN WOMAN. 137 


prerogatives, and passionately refuse to forego them. 
These Samaritans were under no such temptation. Such 
exclusive prerogatives were not, and never had _ been, 
theirs. In their acknowledgment of a Jewish Messiah 
they have passed a judgment on the whole past religious 
history of their nation, have confessed that, which up to 
this moment they had so obstinately denied, that ‘ salva- 
tion is of the Jews ;’ and it only remained for them to 
accept that place which in the economy of this ‘ salvation’ 
was assigned to them, to rejoice that, although ‘of the 
Jews, it was not for them alone; to welcome Him who, 
being first King of Israel, was also Saviour of the world.1 


salutem quam attulerat, toti mundo communem esse testatus est, quo melius 
intelligerent ad se quoque pertinere. Neque enim tanquam legitimos 
heredes ad participandam salutis gratiam eos vocavit, sed docuit se venisse 
ut in Dei familiam extraneos admitteret, ac pacem afferret iis qui procul 
erant. : 

* Some preparations they may have found for this in the prophecy of the 
Shiloh, ‘Unto Him shall the gathering of the people be’ (Gen. xlix. 10). 
It is true that the Samaritans of the present day refer this to Solomon; 
but of old they referred it, and rightly, to the Messiah (Hengstenberg, 
Christologie, vol. i. p. 76. Compare three instructive sermons by Bishop 
Horsley, Sermons, 1829, vol. i. pp. 364-415). 


4. THE SONS OF THUNDER. 
Mark iii. 17. 


ΤῊΝ mention of the new name given by the Lord to the 
two sons of Zebedee is one of the innumerable precious 
notices which we owe exclusively to St. Mark. From 
him alone we learn that the three foremost apostles, equal 
in so much else, were also equal in this, that they all 
obtained a new name, and that name imposed on them 
by the Lord Himself. Yet this new and magnificent 
title of ‘ Boanerges, or ‘sons of thunder, with which 
the two sons of Zebedee were adorned, is not without its 
difficulties and obscurities. For, leaving out of sight 
those of the formation of the word, which are not in- 
considerable, it must strike every thoughtful reader as 
remarkable, that while the name Peter, or its Aramaic 
equivalent Cephas, just before recorded as added by the 
Lord to Simon, recurs continually in the sacred narrative, 
is so stamped upon him as in the end almost entirely to 
displace the name which he bore while yet a fisher not of 
men but of fishes, this name, the imposition of which is 
related in exactly the same language and with the same 
emphasis, never once reappears in Scripture; ‘ you never 
find James called Boanerges, or John so called, either by 
themselves or by others’ (Lightfoot). 


THE SONS OF THUNDER. 139 


Various explanations of this fact have been offered. 
Thus it has been ingeniously suggested that the name 
was, so to speak, a dual name, and belonged to the two 
apostles, not severally and independently one of the other. 
but only as a brother-pair, and in their connexion one with 
the other, in the same way that Dioscuri belonged to 
Castor and Pollux, or to Zethus and Amphion; which 
being so, the occasions of its use must have been of rarest 
occurrence, and with the early death of James (Acts 
xii. 2) must have ceased altogether, the name itself be- 
coming, as one might say, extinct with him." And yet, 
ingenious as this explanation must be owned to be, it is 
doubly at fault. Even granting that this was such a dual 
name, and only proper as applied to the pair, yet of such 
opportunities for its use quite sufficient occur in the 
Gospel history to prove the inadequacy of this explana- 
tion. The two make together their petition that they 
may have the first and foremost places in Christ’s king- 
dom (Mark x. 37). Together they propose to call down 
fire on the inhospitable village of the Samaritans (Luke 
ix. 54). They are named together as accompanying 
Peter on that night made memorable by the second 
miraculous draught of fishes (John xxi. 2). But besides 
all this, the assumption on which the explanation rests is 
erroneous. There may be some ambiguity in our Version. 
‘ He surnamed them Boanerges ;’? but there is none in the 
original. Anyone turning to it will at once perceive that 
St. Mark distinctly implies that each’ of the twain, by 
himself and apart from the other, was by the Lord called 
a ‘son of thunder ;’ that, while the Evangelist records the 
‘name’ Peter as given to Simon, when he tells of James 


1 50 Theodoret: υἱοὺς βροντῆς τὴν ξυνωρίδα τῶν ἀποστόλων ἐκαλέσε. 


140 THE SONS OF THUNDER. 


and John it is no longer the ‘name’ (ὄνομα) but the 
‘names’ (ὀνόματα), “ sons of thunder, which they receive ; 
and thus no room is left for such a solution of the diffi- 
culty. But may not this difficulty be of a much simpler 
solution? Of no other than this, that the surname 
‘Boanerges, being common to both apostles, would not 
have sufficiently designated which of them was intended ; 
and that this inconvenience may have hindered it from 
ever growing into an appellation ; which, indeed, there was 
no need that it should do, having been given with quite 
another object and intention. 

A more important question lies behind this—What was 
the meaning and purpose of this name? That it was in- 
tended as a name of honour was never for an instant 
doubted by Christian antiquity; and indeed, since all 
acknowledge the title given to Simon, which immediately 
precedes it, to have been such an honourable super- 
addition, it seems wholly inconceivable that there should 
have been another name imposed on two other of the 
Elect Twelve in quite a different intention and spirit. In- 
deed there are few interpretations of Holy Scripture 
more monstrous in their kind than that other supposition, 
namely, that the two sons of Zebedee acquired this 
addition, ‘sons of thunder, from the untimely and 
passionate request of theirs, that they might be allowed 
to call down fire from heaven on the inhabitants of that 
churlish Samaritan village (Luke ix. 54). Calmet was, 
I believe, the first who started this explanation,’ at least 
I have not seen it traced to an earlier source, but it has 
found much acceptance since. Thus Tholuck, as quoted 


*In his Dictionnaire, 1730 


“ 


THE SONS OF THUNDER. 141 


below,’ assumes it as certain, and affirms that the name 
was imposed upon them ‘to remind them evermore of that 
inner foe with whom they needed to contend.’ 

But not to urge that there is nothing about thunder 
in that passage, nor yet at 2 Kin. i. g-11, to the pre- 
cedent of which the two apostles avowedly refer (‘as 
Elias did’), the deriving of their name from this fault 
of theirs goes counter to the whole tenour and analogy 
of Scripture. The new name there is evermore the 
expressing and fixing of the new nature; it is the record 
of some notable achievement, some glorious confession by 
word or deed, through which the servant of God, who 
thus wins this name, has been permanently lifted up into 
a higher region of being than that which he moved in 
before (Gen. xxxii. 26; Judg. vi. 32; Acts iv. 36, 37; 
Matt. xvi. 18). It marks some signal epoch or crisis of 
his spiritual life, which with its results by aid of this new 
title is stamped upon him for ever (Num. xiii. 16; Gen. 
Xvil. 5, 15). The essence then of the new name being 
throughout all the rest of Scripture at once the expressing 
and the fixing of the new nature, it is quite impossible 
that here it should be exactly the reverse; namely, the 
seizing of a transient and momentary outcoming of the 
old nature, and the imparting of a fixity and permanence 
to that. Simon’s habitual firmness, not his momentary 
weakness, his confession, not his denial, of his Lord, was in- 
corporated in his name, Cephas, or Peter, or the Rock ; nor 
can we doubt that in like manner the Lord expresséd at 

’ Wir finden ein blindes natirliches Feuer bei ihm [Johannes] in jenem 
Zuge, der Lue. ix. 54 erzihlt wird. Die hierbei bewiesene Gesinnung scheint 
tief aus seinem Character hervorgegangen zu sein, denn Christus legte wegen 


dieses Unfalls ihm und seinem Bruder den Namen βοανεργές, υἱοὶ βροντῆς 
bei, um sie immer an ihren innern Feind zu erinnern. 


142 THE SONS OF THUNDER. 


once the noblest and most characteristic features of these 
two apostles in this designation which he gave them. 
Even in the kingdoms of this world a king does not fasten 
on one of his noblest and most honourable captains a 
title which shall remind of his single defeat, but rather 
one which shall be the abiding record of the most glorious 
victories which he has won. Not Teneriffe, but the Nile, 
is bound up with Nelson’s title. And if thus in this lower 
world of ours, how much more certainly in the kingdom 
of grace. . 

It is not easy to see what the motive was for abandon- 
ing the earlier exposition. It is true that we cannot link 
the giving of this name with any particular incident in 
the lives of these two, as we can the new name which 
Abram (Gen. xvii. 5), which Jacob (Gen. xxxii. 28), 
which Gideon (Jud. vi. 32), which Simon (Matt. xvi. 16- 
18), which Joses (Acts iv. 36), and perhaps also which 
Saul (Acts xiii. 7-9) acquired, with incidents in their 
lives. It must be allowed also that the usual conception 
of St. John, and of the character of his ministry, is some- 
what different from that of a ‘son of thunder” And yet a 
little deeper insight into the matter will, I am persuaded, 
afford us much which will help to explain and justify the 
bearing of this name by his brother and by himself. _ 

There can, of course, be no difficulty in regard to 
St. James. We have not, indeed, very much in his history 
accounting for and illustrating this name; but then we 


* Tillemont: Jésus-Christ en les appellant ἃ l’apostolat, leur donna le 
surnom de Boanerges pour marquer la fermeté et la grandeur de leur foy, 
et parcequ’ils étoient destinés ἃ faire éclater la majesté de Dieu dans tout 
lunivers, ἃ ne pas aimer la terre, mais ἃ la faire trembler pour la soumettre 
ἃ Jésus-Christ, ἃ ne point craindre toute la puissance des hommes, mais ἃ 
se tenir toujours élevés au-dessus d’eux. 


THE SONS OF THUNDER. 143 


have not much in any shape about him; and in what we 
have there is nothing which does not perfectly agree 
with, or even confirm, we may say, its fitness. And here, 
indeed, when we are gathering notices which should 
account for their being so called, that fiery zeal of his 
and of his brother, who would have burnt up the village 
that refused the shelter of a night to their Lord, may be 
fitly adduced as illustrating this title, though utterly mis- 
leading when cited as explaining and justifying it. It 
illustrates this title, because it shews us what in these two 
apostles was the natural groundwork of their character ; 
a groundwork which Christ certainly did not dissolve; 
but rather, calling them these ‘sons of thunder,’ recog- 
nized; even while by the same act He pledged Himself 
to purify it from whatever of earthly and carnal mingled 
with it, and threatened to spoil it. The very failings 
which on that memorable occasion the brother apostles 
displayed were failings of no common souls; were as 
luxuriant weeds, which, weeds as they were, testified for 
the richness of the soil out of which they sprang and its 
capacity for bearing the very noblest fruits. In their 
sense of righteousness and judgment, in their indignation 
against sin,—all this, indeed, displaying itself in an im- 
patient and untimely severity, which would have consumed 
the sinners and the sin together, rather than the sin 
alone, with a saving alive of the sinners,—we see the ‘sons 
of thunder’ on their natural side, and as they would have 
been but for that grace, which, retaining and exalting all 
the good of the natural character, did at the same time 
transform it from human to divine, separate all the 
drossy elements of earth, and retain only the pure gold of 
heaven. 


144 THE SONS OF THUNDER. 


And the early martyrdom of James, the fact that he, 
first of the apostles, stained with his blood the perse- 
cutor’s sword (Acts xil. 2), we may accept this as a 
further attestation that he indeed was all that his name 
implied. A ‘son of thunder, and as such, arousing, 
startling, terrifying, he may have caused the thunders of 
the divine displeasure against sin to be heard with a 
clearness and an energy which drew on him the peculiar 
and early hatred of the ungodly world’—the holiness of 
his life lending additional weight and terror to his words 
—for in him, no doubt, that saying will have found its 
fullest application, ‘ Cujus vita fulgor, ejus verba tonitrua.’ 

And then, in respect of John, much of the embarrass- 
ment which some feel, when they would make an estimate 
of what in him there is to justify this title, arises from. 
their leaving the Apocalypse out of consideration (it is 
singular how often this is done), and regarding St. John 
as if he were the author of the Gospel and Epistles alone. 
Certainly those who forget the Apocalypse, or adjudge its 
authorship to some other than St. John, must find this 
word of the Lord’s only inadequately fulfilled in the 
writings which will then remain to him. For without 
denying that much in his Gospel too is like thunder out 
of a clear heaven,—the Fathers were especially fond of 
quoting in proof the very opening words of the Gospel,’ 
—yet in the Apocalypse those which eminently may be 
called the thunder-voices make themselves to be heard, 
and do so with a greater loudness and distinctness than 


*So Chrysostom (Hom. 56 in Matt.): οὕτω yap ἣν σφοδρὸς καὶ βαρὺς 
"Tovdatow, ὡς καὶ τὸν Ἣ ρώδην ταύτην δωρεὰν μεγίστην νομίσαι χαρίσασθαι τοῖς 
Ἰουδαίοις, εἰ ἐκεῖνον ἀνέλοι. 


3. See Suicer, 7168. 8. v. βροντή. 


; THE SONS OF THUNDER. 145 


in any other book of the New Testament.t It need not 
be observed that the thunder in Scripture is no mere 
natural phenomenon. We do not read there that τ 
thunders, but that God thunders.? It is there evermore 
regarded as the voice of God (Ps. xviii. 13; xxix. 3; 
Ixviii. 33; Ixxvii. 18; civ. 7; Job xxvi. 14; xxxvii. 4, 5; 
xl.g; 1 Sam. vil. 10, LX X.), and especially as the voice of 
his displeasure against the sins of men (1 Sam. xii. 17, 18). 
The terror which it inspires springs from the interpreta- 
tion of it which everyone unconsciously makes, from the 
sense which everyone has, that it is such a voice in nature, 
with which God is speaking, and speaking in anger, to a 
sinful world. And what book is there in Scripture so 
full of these voices of God as that with which the Canon 
is sealed? Nor certainly can it be regarded as a mere 
accident that, with the exception of this passage about 
St. John, only in his own writings is there any mention 
of thunder in the New Testament at all. In his Gospel, 


* Βροντόφωνος is an epithet given in the Greek Church to St. John. The 
brothers received the name of ‘sons of thunder,’ in Theophylact’s words 
ὡς μεγαλοκήρυκας καὶ θεολογικωτάτους. Epiphanius says of St. John: υἱὸς 
ὄντως βροντῆς τῇ οἰκεία peyadodwvia ὥστερ ἐκ τινῶν νεφελῶν τὼν τῆς σοφίας 
αἰνιγμάτων τὴν εὐσεβῆ ἡμῖν ἔννοιαν τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ ἀνῆκε. See the valuable collec- 
tion of passages from the Greek Fathers in Suicer, 7268. 5.0. βροντή. 
Bengel among moderns has well expressed the same : Magnifica appellatio. 
Tonitru in Scriptura et terribile et festivum quiddam est. Evangelium item 
mundum terret, piis letitiam et fructum affert. That there is a natural 
fitness in such an application of βροντή, the parallel use of βροντᾶν in pro- 
fane Greek attests. Pericles had the name of Ὀλύμπιος, as, like Zeus himself, 
lightning and thundering (ἤστραπτ᾽, ἐβρόντα, Aristophanes, Acharn. 531; 
cf. Vesp. 624) over Greece. In the ‘geminos, duo fulmina belli Scipiadas,’ 
of Virgil we have not the identical, but a closely cognate, image. 

* J. Grimm, in an article, Ueber die Namen des Donners, in his Klein. 
Schrift. vol. ii. p. 421, has some interesting proofs of the many nations among 
whom the same language prevails. 

* Gregory the Great (Moral. xxix. 24): Quid enim per tonitruum nisi 
preedicatio superni terroris accipitur ? 


L 


146 THE SONS OF THUNDER. 


it is but a passing notice (xii. 29); in the Apocalypse, 
however, the thunders constitute a prominent part of the 
divine machinery and symbolism (Rev. iv. 5; vi. 1; vill. 5; 
ἘΠ) ἡ; Xi. 195 Xiv. 2; xvi. 183 xix. 6). ΡΣ 
whose ear was opened, first himself to catch, and then to 
give back to the Church and to the world, these thunder 
voices, must be allowed to have approved himself that 
“son of thunder, even to our understanding, which the 
Lord has named hin.’ 


1 There is an able and interesting article by Gurlitt in the Theol. Stud. und 
Krit. 1829, pp. 715-738, on the word Boanerges, and the intention with 
which this name was given to the sons of Zebedee. It is more valuable, 
however, as containing a history of the past exegesis, than as itself arriving 
at any satisfactory results. 


5. WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER 
CHILDREN. 


Matt. xi, 16, 19; Luke vii. 31-35. 


As nothing which was wrought among the children of 
men escaped the notice of the Lord, so nothing was so far 
beneath Him but that He was willing to use it for the 
setting forth the truths of his kingdom. Those truths 
had in themselves such inherent dignity and grandeur 
that they needed not to fear anything from being brought 
into this contact. We have a striking example of this, his 
fearless use of the-common and the familiar, in that com- 
parison with which He closes his testimony to the character 
and work of the Baptist : ‘ But whereunto shall I liken 
this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the 
markets, and calling unto their fellows, and saying, We have 
piped unto you, and ye have not danced ; we have mourned 
unto you, and ye have not lamented. Here the Lord 
finds in the sports and altercations of boys playing in the 
streets that which shall serve his turn, shall set forth and 
illustrate the truth which He hasin hand. One group of 
these children, in that spirit of imitation so characteristic 
of their age, has been acting now a marriage, and now a 
funeral; has been piping now, and mourning then; but in 
the end complains that another band, whose help they 
needed, and whom they would fain have drawn into their 


L 2 


148 WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN. 


sports, as mourners at their mock funeral, if they would 
not be revellers at their mock marriage, have stood 
peevishly aloof, and refused altogether to take a share in 
their games: ‘ We have piped unto you, and ye have not 
danced ; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not 
lamented.’ * 

Christ proceeds to explain why and wherein that gene- 
ration were like to these to whom He has just compared 
them: ‘For John came neither eating nor drinking’ (cf. 
Luke i. 80 ; Matt. iii. 4; ix. 14); ‘and they say, He hath a 
devil. We should not have learned except from these 
words that such a taunt was addressed to the Baptist ; 
that they said of the servant what we know that more 
than once they said of the Master (John vii. 20; viii. 48) ; 
at the same time it is exactly the manner of taunt which 
his manner of life, exaggerated, and ‘extravagant as it 
must have seemed to many, was likely to provoke. ‘The Son 
of man came eating and drinking’ (cf. Matt. ix. 14; Luke 
xiv.1; John 1]. 1-11 ; ΧΙ. 2), ‘and they say, Behold a man 
gluttonous, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and 
sinners’ (Luke vil. 39; xv. 2; xix. 7; Matt. ix. 10, 11). 

Few, I think, who at all reflect on the matter, will 
deny that the ordinary explanation of this similitude is 
encumbered with not inconsiderable difficulties. This, as 
needs hardly to be observed, makes the children, who 
complain of the wayward humour of their fellows, and 
that they cannot draw them into any games which they 
suggest, to be Jesus and John; and the meaning will then 

1 Vorstius (De Adag. N. T. c. xi.): Ea verba Salvator tribuit pueris 
sedentibus in foro, qui ludendo imitari solent qua a majoribus natu serio 
agi viderunt, et nunc nuptias celebrant, nunc funera deducunt ; neque tamen 


quosdam qui morosiores sunt, movere possunt, ut et ipsi talibus operam 
navent. 


WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN. 149 


be, This is a generation which it is impossible to please. 
No ways of God are right in its eyes. If He send a pro- 
phet, stern, severe, calling to repentance, holding aloof 
from sinners, a wilderness preacher, a man himself of fasts 
and austerities, as was John, they say he is melancholy 
mad; ‘He hath a devil. If He send One gracious and 
condescending, who mingles with all the common works, 
and walks in all the common ways of men, eating and 
drinking with them, they say, ‘ Behold a man gluttonous, 
and a wine-bibber, with no eminent sanctity about Him. 
John took up a sadder strain, but the men of this genera- 
tion would not fall in with it; he mourned to them, 
but they would not lament. Jesus took up a more joyful 
note; He piped to them; but neither would they consent 
with Him; they would not dance; but found fault with 
the graciousness and condescension of the One as much 
as with the strictness and severity of the other. 

All this is well put by Henry More: ‘Such was the 
perverse and wicked ignorance of those crooked super- 
stitionists, that true goodness in no kind of dress would 
please them. In John the Baptist there was that eminent 
severity and austerity of life accompanying an unre- 
provable integrity and purity of heart, that he might, 
one would think, have commanded them to that which 
was good; but he must have a melancholy devil in him. 
Our Saviour came in a more pleasant and careless garb, 
laying aside that awful and rough severity that was in 
the other, intermingling Himself with all companies, taking 
not at all upon Him, being as other men are in every- 
thing, sin only excepted; (which manner of life as it is 
of more perfection than the other, as supposing more be- 
nignity of nature, and more firm radication in goodness, 


150 WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN. 


so fewer men are capable of it, much less unsteady and 
unresolved youth, who are to fly from suspected com- 
pany as from the devouring plague;) yet, I say, these 
wretched Pharisees, as true detesters of real holiness 
and godliness, whatever they pretend in the shadow there- 
of, cannot give our Saviour a good word, but interpret 
his goodnature good-fellowship, or debauched company- 
keeping; and his serviceable intermingling Himself with 
all sorts of men (publicans and sinners not excepted) for 
their good, friendship and countenance to what is evil.’? 
Such is the common explanation ; and the sense which 
the passage, so interpreted, renders up is a perfectly satis- 
factory one. The only question is, whether our Lord’s 
words yield themselves to it, whether there be not serious 
difficulties in this allotment of the several portions of the 
dramatic action here brought before our eyes. In the 
first place, Christ says, ‘ This generation ts like unto 
children ; but, according to the received explanation as 
given above, it would be Jesus and John who were like 
the children complaining that it was impossible to chime 
in with the shifting moods of their fellows, and not that 
generation at all. Maldonatus, as is usual with him, 
manfully acknowledges this difficulty; but seeks to get 
rid of it by urging that not part must be compared with 
part, but the whole with the whole; and adduces as a 
parallel case Matt. xiii. 24: ‘The kingdom of heaven is 
likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field ;’ 
not being, indeed, likened to him alone, but to all which 
follows. But the case is not exactly in point, for at any 
rate he, the sower, was included in that whereto the king- 
dom was compared; while here the perverse generation 


? On Godliness, viii. 13. 


WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN. 151 


has no resemblance to the children who complain, and to 
whom they are likened, but only to the children that are 
complained of. We cannot then accept this solution. 
And then, further, since John’s ministry preceded the 
Lord’s, and in the interpretation (ver. 18) is the first 
named, we should expect to find ‘ We have mourned unto 
you, which was St. John’s work, adduced the first, and 
not, as both in St. Matthew and St. Luke it is, the last. 
Would it not then be better to shift altogether the 
dramatis persone, and, reallotting the parts, to make, as 
EKuthymius, Stier,’ and Alford have done, the children 
sitting in the markets, and now mourning and now 
piping, to be the Jews, the generation of which the Lord 
just before had spoken; and the companions of whom 
they complain, to be Jesus and John? ‘The fundamental 
thought will still be nearly the same, although expressed 
in a somewhat different manner, although it will not be 
now any more Jesus and John who are introduced finding 
fault with that generation, but that generation finding 
fault with them. The Jews, as according to this explana- 
tion the Lord will declare, wanted John to be laxer; they 
would fain have had him give up his strict ascetic ways, 
his rigid separation from sinners, his stern summonses to 
repentance ; and complained that he would not do so, 
that he would not dance to their piping (John v. 25). 
Christ Himself was equally, as they accounted, at fault, 
though in an opposite extreme. They could as little 
understand a prophet such as He was (Matt. ix. 11; Luke 
xv. 2). They mourned to Him, and He would not 
lament. The bridegroom and the bringer of joy, He 
would not change for any sadder note, that note of joy 


* Reden Jesu, in loco. 


1.2. WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN, 


to which the Gospel that He preached was set (Luke ν. 
30-35), any more than John to please them would 
change and renounce the note of a sterner sadness to 
which his preaching of the law was attuned. 

Each messenger and prophet of God the men of that 
generation desired to be something other than what he was 
—their distaste and disaffection extending really far deeper 
than to the particular manner and fashion of the one or 
of the other, to the severity of the one, or to the laxity, 
as they chose to call it, of the other—their objection being 
indeed to any messenger of God, in whatever guise he 
came. As it was then, so is it at all times. Some ex- 
claim, ‘The Gospel is too strict, too severe; it demands 
too much:’ these are the finders of fault in John; while 
others say, ‘It is too lax, too free; it encourages sin;’ 
these finding fault with the Lord; the two forms of 
murmuring and opposition being, strange to say, found 
sometimes united in the same persons. The ambassadors 
of Christ, who have to call men alternately to fasts and 
festivals of the spirit, must expect from the world such a 
captious and hostile criticism as this; it is part of that 
which they have to bear. They must look for a similar 
indignation, that they will not at the world’s bidding be 
exactly the contrary of that which they were sent to be; 
this indignation being indeed the covert under which men 
escape from the summons, now to a spiritual joy, and now 
to a spiritual sorrow. 

But while it was thus with that generation, ‘ Wisdom 
is justified of her children.” All did not so evade the law 
by pleading the Gospel, nor the Gospel by pleading the 
law. Some recognized in these two, and in the harmony 
of these two, the law being good no less than the Go§8pel, 


WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN. 153 


if only used lawfully, ‘the manifold wisdom of God;’ out 
of which He sent not a John only, nor a Christ only, but 
one and the other, the severe and the mild, the stern and 
the gracious, the preacher of the law and the preacher of 
grace, that so He might win men by the one or by the 
other, or else by handing them over from the one to the 
other (Gal. iii. 42; John i. 35-40). 

Such seems to me the general drift and tenour of these 
latest words; which yet may claim to be more closely 
examined, presenting as they do, by the acknowledge- 
ment of all, more difficulties than one. And first, seeing 
that the Lord is clearing the dealings of God with men, 
in other words, clearing his own, why, it might be asked, 
does He let his own personality fall into the back ground, 
and affirm, not of Himself, but of Wisdom, that she ‘7s 
Justified of her children?’ We may seem, but He does not 
really do this. ‘Wisdom’ here is no abstract quality, 
no attribute of God, any more than at Luke xi. 49; but 
a person; even the same of whom such glorious. things 
are spoken in the Book of Proverbs, who appears there 
as building her mystical house, sending forth her maidens, 
gathering to herself all those who are willing to hear her 
voice; being, indeed, no other than the Word as yet not 
made flesh, or rather that divine Word in ad his dealings, 
both before the Incarnation and after, with the children 
of men ;' who, being this absolute Wisdom, must have 

* Hilary (in looc.): Ipsum se Sapientiam vocavit. Bengel: Non enim 
jam dicitur Filias hominis, ut versu precedente, sed Sapientia; quarum 
appellationum altera convenit statui Christi conspicuo, altera omnibus 
temporibus (Luc. xi. 49). Porro Sapientia hoe loco dicitur, quod Ipse 
optime sciat quid faciendum sit, et actiones Ipsius, purissim’ accommoda- 
tione ad peccatores plenw, non debuerunt sub censuram vocari (Prov. vili. 


1, 32). Grotius too much lets go that the Σοφία is herself a person, when he 
adduces βουλὴ τοῦ Θεοῦ (Luke vii. 30) as an absolute equivalent; though, 


ι4 WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN. 


chosen wisest ways in which to deal with them, and who 
therefore should not have been lightly charged with way- 
wardness and folly. This word ‘ Wisdom’ which Christ 
uses here has the advantage that by aid of it He is able to 
include in a common justification both his own dealings 
and those of John, which last he would fain vindicate not 
less than his own. 

But ‘justified of her children’—what may be the exact 
force of this phrase? ‘To justify, in the uniform lan- 
guage of the New Testament, is to recognize and declare 
as righteous—falsely, it may be; that not being righteous, 
which thus declares itself, or is declared by others, to be 
so (Luke x. 29; xvi. 27); or, and this is far the commoner 
usage, truly—the realities in the moral world correspond- 
ing with the declaration thus made about them. Thus of 
course is it here, where Wisdom is contemplated as on 
her trial, perversely accused by some, and needing there- 
fore to be ‘justified’ by others.’ When it is said that she 
is justified ‘of her children, these last can be no other 
than as many as have accepted her teaching, and now walk 
in her ways. It is not that we are to contemplate these as 
pleading her cause before the world, and so acquitting 
her of these unjust imputations. She needed not their 
advocacy, and ‘babes’ (Matt. xi. 25) as they were, they 
this excepted, he has perfectly seized the intention of these words: ἡ σοφία 
hic nihil aliud est quam quod apud Lucam vii. 30, βουλὴ τοῦ Θεοῦ, 
sapientissimum nimirum Dei consilium Judwos et Johannis severitate et 
Christi comitate ad peenitentiam revocantis, ne quid inexpertum relinqueret, 
atque etiam ne quid illi causari possent ... Johannes, ut peenitentia praco, 
ad severitatem compositus, Christus comis ut venia largitor. 

1 Bengel: Sapientia justificata est; hoc est, criminatores illam ream fecere, 
scandalizati sunt in ed (ver. 23), eoque rem adduxere, ut demum justificari 
debuerit ipsa, et justa asseri ostendique, omnes ejus actiones ad absorbendam 


injustitiam, justitiamque implendam comparatas esse, cum tamen sine excep- 
tione fuisset amplectenda. 


WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN. 155 


could thus have done little to serve her. But yet in another 
sense it was out of the mouths of these babes and sucklings 
that her praise was perfected. In the fact that there 
were these children of Wisdom, that she had gathered so 
many round her, who owned her for their spiritual mother, 
hereby and herein she was justified, acquitted of all those 
frivolous charges and all that unrighteous blame which 
had been heaped upon her.’ As Jesus spake these words, 
He may have looked round at the little company of his 
disciples. These were his justification and John’s ; these 
did themselves constitute a vindication of Wisdom’s ways 
in the face of a gainsaying world.’ 


1 So Jerome rightly, with only the fault that he limits the ‘children’ too 
exclusively to the apostles; they properly include ald the converts whom 
either John or the Lord had made: Ego, qui sum Dei virtus et Sapientia 
Dei, justifecisse ab apostolis, filiis meis, comprobatus sum. 

* Meyer (in loc.), as it seems to me, has seized the meaning exactly: 
Und gerechtfertiget worden (das heisst, als die wahre Weisheit dargestellt 
worden) ist die Weisheit (die in Johannes und mir zur Offenbarung ge- 
kommen ist) von Seiten ihrer Kinder, das heisst, von Seiten ihrer Verehrer 
und Anhinger, welche eben dadurch, dass sie sich ihr angeschlossen haben 
und sich von ihr leiten lassen, jene Urtheile des profanum vulgus als 
unrichtig dargestellt und die Weisheit factisch gerechtfertiget haben. Die 
(factische) Bewdhrung ist der Weisheit von ihren Verehrern gekommen (ἀπό, 
nicht ὑπό). There is more than one other explanation of these certainly 
difficult words, which I have not cared to deal with in the text, as they 
certainly appear to me wholly untenable. That which has found most 
favour I will give in Gerhard’s words (Harm. Fvang. 56): Divina Sapientia 
a filiis suis justificatur, hoc est quasi in judicium pertrahitur, disceptatur 
cum ef, de jure accusatur, taxatur, reprehenditur, ut in qua nune hoc nune 
illud desideretur. Et qui debebant esse filii sapientia divine, hoc est 
obedientes discipuli, illi sumunt sibi, quasi pro tribunali sedentes, jus vocis 
decisive, ut pro libitu suo vel pro vel contra divinam sapientiam possint 
pronunciare. Not to speak of other objections, this explanation rests on the 
ascription to the verb δικαιοῦν of a meaning which in Biblical Greek it 
never possesses. It is never there to judge and declare guilty, but always, 
to judge and declare righteous. The only exception to this which I know 
is Ps. lxxiii. 13, where it means neither one nor the other, but is used as= 
dyvifew, Gerhard seeks to sustain his interpretation by aid of Isai. xliii. 9; 
2 Kin. xy. 4; but neither passage helps him in the least. 


6. THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 


Matt. viii. 18-23; Luke ix. 57-62. 


‘Tue manifold wisdom’ of Christ, which shewed itself in 
his drawing and attaching of souls to Himself, and of 
which there has just been occasion to speak, must often 
fill us with devout admiration; but it never does this 
more than when there are brought before us in quick 
succession moral and spiritual conditions, which have 
much apparent similarity, and which yet are most diversely 
treated by Him." Such we have here. There are two, 
or adding one of whom St. Luke alone keeps record, three, 
who either in their own intention or in the Lord’s, are 
candidates for admission into the inner circle of disciples, 
into the circle, that is, of those who should not merely 
themselves receive the truth, but, as Christ’s witnesses, 
should be actively employed in imparting the knowledge 
of that truth to others. The occasion which gave room 
for such a dealing with these souls was as follows: ‘ Vow 
when Jesus saw great multitudes about Him, He gave com- 
mandment to depart unto the other side’ One of what we 
may call the lesser crises in his ministry here arrived. There 


* Augustine (Serm. 100): Obtulit se unus, ut eum sequeretur, et repro- 
batus est; alius non audebat, et excitatus est; tertius differebat, ut culpatus 


THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 157 


is growing up around Him that tumult and excitement, in- 
cident on the gathering of enormous crowds, with expecta- 
tions raised to the highest, which more than anything else 
threatened to defeat his plans, to alter, against his will, 
the whole character of the work which He was working ; 
which, therefore, by all means He sought to avert or to 
repress (Luke xiv. 25-33; xix. 11-27); or, where this 
was beyond his power, to withdraw Himself from it 
(John vi. 15). The retirement which at such seasons 
served Him best He found upon the other side of the lake 
of Galilee; until, indeed, the eagerness of the multitude 
had learned to follow Him even thither (John vi. 2). 
Such a retreat to that other side He is about now to 
undertake. Who will go with Him, and thus give more 
explicit announcement than he may yet have had the 
opportunity of giving, that he casts in his lot with 
Christ ? 

First there offers himself a Scribe— one “Scribe, as 
St. Matthew says, with, perhaps, an emphasis on the ‘ one,’ 
to mark how unfrequent such offers were. And his words 
sound fairly, ‘ Master, I will follow Thee whithersoever 
Thou goest. They almost remind one of the great- 
hearted words of Ittai to David: ‘Surely in what place 
my lord the king shall be, whether in death or life, even 
there also will thy servant be’ (2 Sam. xv. 21). Nor is 
there any reason to suppose that this aspirant to disciple- 
ship means at the time otherwise than he speaks. Yet 
is there not indeed in him that true devotedness to Christ, 
which shall lead him so to follow that Lord in this world, 
that in the world to come he shall follow Him whither- 
soever He goeth (Rev. xiv. 4).'_ These words have more 


* Calvin: Vult quidem hic Christum sequi, sed mollem et amcenam viam, 


158 THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 


in them of Peter’s confident asseveration, ‘Lord, I am 
ready to o with Thee, both unto prison and to death’ 
(Luke aoe 33). At all events, they inspire Him, who 
knowing all things (John xxi. 17), ‘knew what was in man’ 
with no greater confidence than those other words here- 
after should do; for with no welcome for this volunteer, 
but rather a repulse, He answers, ‘ Zhe foxes have holes, 
and the birds of the air have nests ;* but the Son of man 
hath not where to lay his head.” In other words, ‘ Lookest 
thou for worldly commodities through the following of 
Me? In this thou must needs be disappointed. These 
cannot be my follower’s portion, since they are not mine. 
Beasts have dens, and birds have shelters, which they may 
call their own; but the Son of man is homeless and 


et hospitia bonis omnibus reperta somniat, quum per spinas ambulandum 
sit Christi discipulis, et per continuas erumnas ad crucem pergendum. Ergo 
quo magis festinat, eo minus paratus est. Perinde enim facit ac si in 
umbré et deliciis, sine sudore et pulvere, extra telorum jactum militare 
vellet. 

1 Κατασκηνώσεις ig so rendered in the Versions preceding, as well as in the 
Authorized Version. The Vulgate in like manner has ‘nidos;’ but an earlier 
Latin version ‘diversoria,’ while Augustine has ‘nidos’ (Serm. ec. 1) and ‘diver- 
soria’ (Con. Faust. xxii. 48) and ‘ tabernacula’ (Quest. xvii. in Matt. qu. 5); 
these latter, with the equivalent English “shelters,’ (Chrysostom substitutes 
karaywyia), are on all accounts preferable renderings. For, in the first place, 
birds do not retire to their nests except at one brief period of the year; and 
then, secondly, κατασκηνώσεις has so much more naturally the more general 
meaning of shelters, habitations, latibula, cubilia, or, more strictly, umbracula 
ex ramis et frondibus arborum contexta (Corn. a Lapide), Wohnungen (de 
Wette), that one must needs agree with Grotius: Quin vox hee ad arborum 
ramos pertineat dubitaturum non puto qui loca infra, xiii.,32; Mare. iv. 32, 
et Luc. xiii. 9, inspexerit. He might have added Ps. civ. 12; Dan. iv. 18, 
LXX. See Fischer, De Vitiis Lex. N. T. pp. 285-290; and on φωλεός 
(-- τόπος, οὗ τὰ θηρία κοιμᾶται, Hesychius) see p. 287, note. 

* Very curious is the turn which Augustine (Znarr. in Ps. χο., Serm. 2) 
gives to these words: Vulpes in te foveas habent; volucres czli nidos in te 
habent; vulpes dolus est, volucres czeli superbia est . . . Potest in te habitare 
superbia et dolus; Christus non habet ubi in te habitet, ubi reclinet caput 
suum. Quia inclinatio capitis, humilitas Ohristi est. Of. Serm. c. 1. 


THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 159 


houseless upon earth; He has not where to lay his 
head. Itis with Hin®as with Jacob at his poorest estate, 
when, fleeing from his brother’s wrath, he tarried all 
night at Haran, and took of the stones of that place, and. 
put them for his pillow’ (Gen. xxviii. 11). Nor does 
this answer of Christ our Lord come out to us in all its 
depth of meaning, till we realize that hour when upon 
his cross He bowed his head, not having where to lay it, 
and having bowed it thus, gave up the ghost (John 
mix: 30). 

Whether the issue was here as in the case of that rich 
young man (Matt. xix. 22), whether this one also with- 
drew, we are not informed ;' it is most probable that he 
did so. But whatever was the issue, this reply of Christ 
was not meant any more than his reply to that other, 
merely and only to repel; but rather to throw back this 
candidate for the honours of discipleship on deeper heart- 
searchings; that, having made these, he might either fall off 
altogether, not beginning to build a tower which he could 
not finish, or that he might join himself to the Lord in 
quite another spirit from that in which he made his 
present offer of service (Luke xiv. 25-33). 

But checking this one, the Lord incites another; for 
He knew there was more truth in the backwardness of 
him to whom He addresses Himself now than in the 
forwardness of that other who had just addressed Him. 
It was, as we learn from St. Luke, in reply to a ‘ Follow 
Me, from the lips of Christ that this one answered, ‘ Lord, 


. 

* Corn. a Lapide: Quod audiens siluit, ac spe sud frustratus, ab oculis 
Christi se subduxit, ut tacite hic innuit Mattheus. Tertullian (Ads. 
Marcion. iv. 23), besides taking this for granted, assumes further that we 
are to read in these words an absolute rejection of him on the Lord’s part, 
which seems to me a mistake, 


160 THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 


suffer me first to go and bury my father.” In the early 
Church this was oftenest, if not always, understood, ‘My 
father now lies dead; suffer me, before I attach myself to 
Thee, to render the last offices of piety to him.’ Nota 
few in later times, I know none earlier than Theophylact,* 
but with him agree Grotius, Calvin, Bengel, and others, 
have understood it otherwise—as though his father was 
now in extreme old age, with one foot, as we say, in the 
grave; and that the request of this son was, that he 
might be permitted to tend and cherish his few days 
that remained; being ready, when these offices of filial 
observance were no more required of him, to obey this 
bidding. But there is every reason for adhering to the 
earlier interpretation. It is little likely that a disciple, 
or one ripe for being a disciple, would at such a crisis 
have asked respite from service for a period so utterly un- 
certain as this would have been.? Moreover, a son would 
scarcely speak in such language of attendance on a father 
that yet lived. The point too of Christ’s rejoinder would 
thus be missed: ‘Let the dead bury their dead; let the 
spiritually dead bury the naturally dead—which naturally 
dead He, designating as ‘ their dead, implies to belong, and 
to have belonged, to the same sphere of death as those who 
shall now perform the last offices for them. At the same 
time by the former ‘dead’ we must rather understand 
those in whom the spiritual life is as yet unawakened, than 
urge with any emphasis their death in trespasses and sins ; 
that must of necessity be implied, yet rather on its nega- 
tive than its positive side. ‘The spiritually dead, those 

1 Theophylact: τὸ γὰρ θάψαι ἐνταῦθα, τοῦτο σημαίνει: τὸ ἐπιμελείας ἀξιῶσαι, 
ἄχρι καὶ τῆς ταφῆὴ 


* Maldonatus : Verisimile non est eum quem Christus cognoscens vocabat, 
tam longi tamque incerti temporis inducias petivisse. 


THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 161 


who are not quickened as thou art with the spirit of a 
new life, are yet sufficient for the fulfilling of this office 
which would now call thee away from Me, namely, the 
burying of the naturally dead; they can perform it 
as well as thou, and, under present circumstances, thou 
must be contented to leave it to them.’ When 
duties come into collision, sacred duties such as_ that 
which this man pleaded (and how sacred for a pious 
Jew they were we see from Tob. iv. 3; xiv. 10, 11; not 
to mention the frequent notice in the early history of 
the due performance of these offices by children to their 
parents, Gen. xxv. 9; xxxv. 29; 1. 13), even these must 
give way to more sacred yet. Christ had said to this man, 
‘ Follow Me; so that now that word held good, ‘ Whoso 
loveth father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of 
Me.’ And then, in words which we owe to St. Luke alone, 
Christ justifies this his withdrawing of him from attend- 
ance on the dead. He had fitness for a work which, if 
not directly with the living, was yet with those who were 
capable of being made alive: ‘Go thou, and preach the 
kingdom of God, spread far and wide (διάγγελλε) the 
glad tidings of life, which as many as hear shall live.? 
One of my royal priesthood (Lev. xxi. 1-12), a Nazarite 


* Hilary: Admonetur ut meminerit quod Pater sibi vivus in celis est 
. mortuos autem eos esse, quiextra Deum vivant. Et idcireco mutua 
mortuis officia relinquenda, ut mortui sepeliantur a mortuis; quia’per Dei 
fidem vivos vivo oporteat adherere. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, xx. 6): 
Habent enim et anima mortem suam in impietate et peccatis ... ut scilicet 
in anima mortui, in corpore mortuos sepelirent. Cf. De Trin. iv. 3; 
Serm.c. 1. Corn. a Lapide: Ludit Christus in voce mortuos. Prius enim 
mortuos spiritualiter, fide gratiique Dei destitutos significat. Posterius 
mortuos corporaliter intelligit. 

* That the antithesis is between death and life Augustine well brings out 
(Serm. lxii.): Docuit magister quid deberet preponere. Volebat enim eum 
esse Vivi verbi preedicatorem ad faciendos victuros. 

M 


162 THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 


of mine (Num. vi. 7), having fellowship with Me who am 
the Life, thy occupation is henceforth with the living, and 
not with the dead.” 

A third, of whom only St. Luke makes report, offers 
himself for discipleship, ‘ Lord, I will follow Thee ;)—yet 
this with a condition, and craving time for farewells which 
he fain would interpose ; ‘but let me first go bid them 
farewell who are at home at my house’—this rendering of 
our English Version being preferable to that which some 
would substitute, but let me first set in order the things 
in my house.” But he too must learn that there is no 
dallying with a heavenly vocation, that when this has 
reached a man, no room is left him for conferring with 
flesh and blood (Gal. i. 16); to him too, as to the king’s 
daughter of old, the word of that precept has come, 
‘Forget also thine own people and thy father’s house’ 
(Ps. xlv. 10); while his worst foes, those who will most 
effectually keep him back from God, may be those of his 
own household (Matt. x. 36, 37). The Lord therefore will 
give no allowance to his request, shuts out at once all 
dangerous delays and interludes between the offer of 
service and the actual undertaking of it: ‘And Jesus 
said unto him, No man having put his hand to the plough, 
and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God’ He who 


‘ Tertullian, with allusion to these two passages, one (Ley. xxi 12) for- 
bidding the High Priest to go in to any dead body, or to defile himself for 
his father, the other (Num. vi. 7) extending the same prohibition to the 
Nazarite, goes on to say (Adv. Marc. iv. 23): Puto autem et devotioni [that 
is, to the Nazarite vow] et sacerdotio destinabat, quem predicando regno 
Dei imbuerat. 

2 "Αποτάξασθαι τοῖς εἰς τὸν οἶκόν μου, which the Vulgate translates, renunciare 
his que [8]. qui] domi sunt; but Beza better, ut valedicam iis qui sunt 
domfis mew; so Tertullian, suis valedicere parantem. There is required 
of him an ἀποτάσσεσθαι (see Luke xiv. 33) in quite another sense from that 
which he contemplates. 


THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 163 


holds the plough must not look behind him; if he does, 
he spoils the furrow, and mars the work which he has 
undertaken. Remarkably enough this careless marring 
of the furrow has lent a word to the Latin, and through 
the Latin to our own language; ‘ delirare,’ originally 
to deviate from the ‘lira,’ which is strictly the little 
ridge of earth thrown up by the share between the two 
furrows, and then the furrow itself. The discipleship of 
Christ is such a putting of the hand to the plough, for the 
breaking up of the hard soil of our own hearts, for the 
breaking up of the hard soil of the hearts of others. We 
have the same image, Luke xvii. 7; 1 Cor. ix. 10. It sets 
forth the /abortousness of the work better than the more 
usual image of sowing (Matt. xiii. 3), and, so to speak, 
carries us a step further back in the spiritual husbandry. 
But he who having put his hand to the plough, and thus 
begun well, shall afterwards, Christ does not say turn 
back, but who shall even so much as look back, in token 
that his heart is otherwhere than in the task before him 
(Gen. xix. 26; Luke xvii. 392; 2 Tim. ii. 4; Phil. #i. 14), 
he may still have his hand on the plough; but having 
fallen away in heart and affection from his work, he makes 
no straight furrows, he breaks not up aright any fallow 
ground; he ‘zs not fit, or rather, is of no service and 
profit, ‘for the kingdom of God. Indeed, unless kept to 
his work as an hireling, it is likely that he will presently 
leave his plough in the half-drawn furrow, and be found 
to have exchanged toil and exposure abroad for the com- 
forts and ease of his own hearth (Acts xiii. 13; xv. 38). 
The reference to 1 Kin. xix. 19, which is generally 
here made, is not much to the point, except as an illus- 
tration by way of contrast. This bidding farewell to them 


M2 


164 THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 


of his house was permitted to Elisha; being included in 
the feast which he makes ver. 21; it is refused to this 
disciple. The comparison of that passage with this is in- 
structive thus far, as shewing how much more urgent is 
the call of the Master than of the servant ; how much less 
it will brook question or delay. 


What if those other two, and this third whose call St. 
Luke has associated with theirs, were, as one has suggested, 
Judas Iscariot, Thomas, and Matthew?! In the second 
and third instances the summons is so plainly to a high 
work in the kingdom of God (that ‘ Hollow Me’ of Christ 
ever implying as much, Matt. iv. 19; 1x. 9; Xix. 21; 
John i. 43), and there is altogether so marked an emphasis 
about these calls, that it is difficult to suppose them calls 
merely to discipleship. These were aspirants and can- 
didates in their own eyes, or in their Lord’s, to a higher 
grade, to the apostolate itself. Indeed one of the three 
was a disciple already (Matt. viii. 21), whom the Lord here 
draws into a closer circle of service; and if another had 
already set his hand to the plough (Luke ix. 62), the same 
might be affirmed of him. Moreover, it is very noticeable 
that in immediate sequence to the words thus exchanged 
by Christ with these three, St. Luke proceeds, ‘ After these 
things the Lord appointed other seventy also, seeming 
thereby very distinctly to mark that what had just passed 
had relation to the Twelve; at all events to exclude one 
and all of these now mentioned from the Seventy. Butif — 
not disciples, what else but apostles could any of them 
have been? nor does the fact that St. Matthew’s chrono- 


* The Gnostics, as Irenmus (1. 8.3) tells us, found in them severally 
the representatives of the man ὑλικός, πνευματικός͵ and ψυχικός. 


THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 165 


logical order is here preferable to St. Luke’s take from 
the significancy of this hint. In St. Matthew also we 
note that it is very shortly after the incidents which have 
just been recorded, that the Twelve are definitively set 
apart, that the number of those whom the Lord had been 
gathering one by one, appears complete (x. 1). Some in 
the early Church were moved by these or like probabilities 
to suppose that in one at least of these instances we had 
to do with the calling of an apostle, with that namely of 
Philip. This Clement of Alexandria‘ takes for granted ; 
which, however, could not be; for he was already called 
(John i. 43); as were Andrew and Peter (John i. 4o, 
41), James and John (Luke v. 1-11), and Bartholomew 
(=Nathanael, Johni. 46-52). Three more of the apostles, 
the other James, Lebbzeus (—Jude), and Simon the Ca- 
naanite may have been ‘ brethren of the Lord ;’ who could 
not then have been identical with any of these three. If 
such they were, and if we have the calling of apostles 
here, it can be of no other than those whom I have named. 
At all events the conjecture has enough of psychological 
and other likelihood about it to be worth following up a 
little further. 

Thus the first who offered himself was one whom the 
Lord evidently welcomed with no pleasure, whom He 
would fain have put back from Him, whose large pro- 
fessions inspired Him with no confidence. And how 
remarkable is the Lord’s reply to these professions. He 
to whom all hearts were open, sees as with a glance in 
the heart of this offerer what perhaps at the moment was 
altogether concealed from himself. There is nothing to 
be gotten, He tells him, no worldly advantage to be gained, 


1 Strom. iii. 4. 


166 THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 


through a following of that Son of man, who is poorer 
even than the poorest '—as though He already beheld in 
spirit the unhappy disciple, who, disappointed of his large 
worldly expectations, should seek to redress a little the 
wrong which he counted he had suffered by purloining 
from the common stock (John xii. 6), and should end with 
making merchandize of the Lord of Glory Himself. 

But while he, making this offer of himself, is rather 
repelled than welcomed, the other two have, as we have 
seen, summonses and invitations more or less direct to 
attach themselves ever closer to their Lord; and if they 
be the two who have just been suggested, there is ad- 
dressed to each the exact encouragement and reproof 
which he probably would have needed. ‘Suffer me first 
to go, and bury my father” Wow characteristic of the 
melancholic Thomas is the excuse and the hindrance 
which are pleaded here—of him, who at a later day, in 
the very presence of the Lord and Prince of life, could 
only express his affection to Him by those words, ‘ Let us 
also go that we may die with Him’ (John xi. 16); who 
even after the empty tomb, and the testimony of the 
women and of his fellow apostles, could not disengage 
himself from thoughts of death and the grave, nor be 
persuaded to believe that the Lord had risen indeed 
(John xx. 24, 25). How characteristic was it of him in 
whose mind death was thus uppermost, that on the present 
occasion also the duties to the dead should seem to him 
to overbear those to the living. And Christ’s answer and 
reproof exactly meets the disease and infirmity of his soul; 
‘Thou belongest to the new creation; not to the old 


᾿ Cajetan: Spem lucri tollit hee responsio. 


THE THREE ASPIRANTS. 167 


world of death, but to the new world of life. Go thou 
and preach the kingdom of God. Disperse to others the 
words of that life with which thou thyself hast been 
quickened.’ 

And the third, who cannot obey the calling till he has 
bade a solemn farewell to allin his house, might very well 
be St. Matthew ; who, being refused this, did not therefore 
at this time accompany the Lord; but to whom that Lord 
a little later so spake that he obeyed; and whose farewell 
feast, after he had thrown in his lot with Christ, so that 
then there was no indecision in his asking to be permitted 
to make it, the Lord allowed, and Himself sanctioned and 
adorned with his own presence (Matt. ix. 9,10; Luke v. 
27, 29); and that, although He had disallowed it, so long 
as it was made the condition of obedience. 


168 THE NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, 


7. THE NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, 
AND THE NEW WINE IN THE OLD 
VESSELS. . 


Matt. ix. 14-17; Mark ii. 18-22; Luke v. 33-39. 


Tue feast which Levi made, probably as a sort of leave- 
taking to the other publicans, now that he had found for 
himself a better service than that of the Roman Emperor, 
was very fruitful in rich and precious instruction. There 
was first the Saviour’s answer to those who complained, 
not to Him, but concerning Him, that he ate with pub- 
licans and sinners (ver. 12, 13); and there was then his 
answer to a second remonstrance, on the part not now of 
the Pharisees alone, as we might conclude from St. Luke 
(v. 33), nor yet of John’s disciples alone, as we might 
gather from St. Matthew (ix. 14), but a remonstrance 
coming from these and those, as St. Mark (ii. 18), recon- 
ciling the other two narratives, informs us. That remon- 
strance couched itself in these words, ‘ Why do we and 
the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?’ It is 
with this, and the answer which this called out, that I 
occupy myself here. 

There is something strange at first sight in finding the 
disciples of John associated with the disciples of the Pha- 
risees ; and making common cause with them, rather than 
with Him to whom their Master had borne such signal 
witness (John 1. 29, 36; iii. 26-36) ; for it needs not to 
observe that the fault which was thus imputed to Christ’s 


AND THE NEW WINE IN THE OLD VESSELS. 169 


disciples, if indeed a fault, would have redounded upon 
Him, under whose eye and with whose encouragement 
they bore themselves thus. But one or two considera- 
tions will help to account for a momentary coalition of 
this kind. In the first place, while there was no jealousy 
on the Baptist’s part, but the noblest absence of jealousy, 
at the larger successes and the transcendant dignity of 
the Lord, there was by no means the same entire freedom 
from such a passion on the part of some of his disciples ;' 
and the after-history of too many of his scholars, who 
degenerated, as is well known, into an heretical sect which 
never admitted Christ as the highest, too surely testified of 
this. It is plain ¢hey did not look with a wholly unenvious 
eye at Him increasing, aud John decreasing (John iii. 26-- 
31; iv. 1). Moreover, while each true disciple of John 
would have held with the Lord and found himself on his 
side on almost every other point of difference beween 
Him and the Pharisees, and of course in every essential, 
here in this external matter would be his one point of 
contact with them, and of a greater apparent nearness to 
them than to Him. And thus, without any serious forget- 
fulness of the instructions of their master, now probably 
withdrawn from them, and lying in Herod’s dungeon, with- 
out any deliberate purpose of strengthening the hands of 
Christ’s enemies,” they may have found themselves for this 
once, and on this single point, upon their side; and incau- 
tiously, though not meaning to embarrass Him in the least, 


* Chrysostom however puts this somewhat too strongly: ζηλοτύπως aed 
πρὸς αὐτὸν εἶχον οἱ ᾿Τωάννου μαθηταί. 

* Jerome (in loc.) makes a severer estimate of their fault in this question : 
Nec poterant discipuli Johannis non esse sub vitio, qui calumniabantur eum, 
quem sciebant magistri vocibus praedicatum ; et jungebantur Pharissis, quos 
a Johanne noverant condemnatos [Matt. iii. 7]. 


170 THE NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, 


they may have put this question at once in the Pharisees’ 
name, and in their own: ‘ Why do we and the Pharisees 
Sast oft, but thy disciples fast not ?’ 

He answers their question with another, and with one 
which could hardly help causing them to remember the 
latest testimony which their master had borne to Him 
(see John iii. 29); which implied that He was well aware 
of the exact form which that testimony had taken: ‘ Can 
the children of the bridechamber* mourn as long as the 
bridegroom is with them?’ The disciples are of course ‘ the 
children of the bridechamber ;’ not to be confounded with 
‘the friend of the bridegroom’”’ (John iii. 29), who is one, 
while they are many (Judg. xiv. 11}; just as the office of 
the Baptist was filled by him singly and alone, being not 
indeed higher than the Apostolate, but distinct from it. 
Christ here presents Himself as ‘ the Bridegroom ;’ intend- 
ing, as we may very well suppose, to remind the disciples 
of John that under this very aspect their own master had 
so recently hailed Him.* How large an amount of the 
Old Testament in this single phrase does He claim for 


1 *Ohildren of the bridechamber’ is a phrase which has been sometimes 
wrongly understood, but abundant parallels in the New Testament make its 
meaning sufliciently clear. ‘ The children,’—or better, ‘ the sons,’-—where the 
term is used in a figurative sense, are those who stand in near and intimate 
relation, but at the same time, a relation of subordination to that of which 
they are set forth as the children. The following, I believe, are all the 
passages in which υἱός or υἱοί occur in this figurative sense: βασιλείας (Matt. 
viii. 12; xiii. 38); πονηροῦ (Matt. xiii. 38); γεέννης (Matt. xxiii. 15); 
βροντῆς (Mark iii. 17); εἰρήνης (Luke x. 6); αἰῶνος (Luke xvi, 8; xx. 34); 
φωτός (Luke xvi. 8; John xii. 36); ἀναστάσεως (Luke xx. 36); ἀπωλείας 
(John xvii. 12; 2 Thess. ii. 3); παρακλήσεως (Acts iv. 36); διαβόλου (Acts 
xiii. 10); ἀπειθείας (Eph. li. 2; v. 6; Col. iii. 6). The idiom is rarer in the 
Septuagint than one would expect, but we have there υἱὸς δυνάμεως (1 Kin. 
i. 52); ἀνομίας (Ps. 1xxxviii. 23); θανάτου (2 Sam. xii. 5); ἐτῶν (Gen. xi. 
10); with perhaps one or two others, 

3 The paranymph or ‘best man’=vuyudaywyde (Gen. xxvi. 26; Judg. xiv. 
20), 

* Chrysostom: ἀναμιμνήσκων αὐτοὺς τῶν τοῦ ᾿Ιωάννου ῥημάτων. 


AND THE NEW WINE IN THE OLD VESSELS. 171 


Himself, and as finding its fulfilment in Him; as the whole 
of the Song of Songs; the 45th Psalm; Hosea ii. 19, 20. 
How many marriages, more or less mystical there, does He 
claim as pointing to this, the crowning mystery of all; as 
of Adam with Eve, of Isaac with Rebecca, of Joseph with 
the daughter of Potipherah, of Moses with the Ethiopian 
woman, of Boaz with Ruth, of Solomon with the princess 
of Egypt, of Hosea with Gomer. How much in the New 
Testament, only hereafter to be uttered, does He already 
anticipate in this significant word (Matt. xxi. 1; Xxv. 1; 
2 Cor.-xi: 2; Eph. v: 23-325 Rev...xix. 7,.Q5; xxi. 2). 
He, ‘the Bridegroom, was now with them; it was not 
indeed that the marriage of the Lamb was yet arrived; 
that should not be till long after; but these were his 
espousals ; for as such espousals the brief period of his 
first sojourn upon earth might be fitly regarded; during 
which indeed He did but as it were salute the bride, whom 
hereafter, but only after a long intervening period of 
absence, He should lead home. He would not trouble 
with untimely mourning the brief gladness, so soon to 
disappear, of the present hour. The bridegroom was yet 
to ‘be taken from them, —in that phrase ‘taken from them’ 
there lies already the hint that his absence should be no 
voluntary withdrawing upon his part—a removal rather 
by violence,—and then they who were so jocund now 
should have both reason enough and time enough to 
mourn. Our Lord contemplates the whole time between 
his death and his second coming as a time suitable for 
mourning, being the time of his absence from his Church. 

It might be objected to this interpretation of the words, 
it has been objected by Olshausen, that He was given 
back to his Church at the Resurrection. This is so far 


172 THE NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, 


true, that the mourning is now a mourning of hope and not 
of despair; the Church mourns not for a dead, but only 
for an absent Lord; but still she mourns; and the measure 
of her love to Him will be the measure of her yearning for 
Tim and for his return. At the same time it is true that 
within this period,of her mourning there will be alterna- 
tions of joy and sorrow; the Church will have festivals 
as well as fasts; she will have, that is, some periods when 
her sense of her Lord as taken away will be the fore- 
most thought and most vivid feeling in her mind; she 
will have other periods, when she will put off for a while 
her garments of heaviness, and anoint herself with the oil 
of gladness ; although only for a while, and as well know- 
ing that she shall not put them off for ever, that ever- 
lasting joy shall not be upon her head, till her Lord has 
come back to her again. The note of sorrow is the key- 
note of the Church during all the time that her Lord is 
taken from her; ‘ then shall they fast. 

There is something of an infinite | compassion, of a 
pitying consideration, in this the Lord’s determination 
not. to trouble, nor yet suffer to be troubled by others, 
this present joy—seeing as He did into the depths of time, 
and all the weary and painful way which was yet to be 
travelled over before the final and triumphant goal was 
won. And as this question was put to Him at a feast, 
and at one which He would not see troubled, so we 
may trace something festal and festive in the whole cha- 
racter of his reply; for that too has to do with a bridal 
feast, with garments and with wine. In festal images He 
clothes the justification of his disciples and of Himself." 

‘ Bengel: Magna cum sobrietate et festivitate respondet Dominus; a 


vestibus et vino (quorum usus erat in convivio) parabolas desumit jucundas 
ad confutandam querentium tristitiam. 


AND THE NEW WINE IN THE OLD VESSELS. 173 


The images are two, and this is the first: ‘Vo man put- 
teth a piece of new cloth upon an old garment, for that 
which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and 
the rent is made worse. In St. Luke’s report of these 
words of Christ, some points are more distinctly made than 
in St. Matthew’s, and indeed the whole image, or ‘ parable, 
as by him, and by him only, it is called, appears to a 
certain degree in a modified form. It there stands thus: 
‘No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old ; 
if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece 
which was taken out of the old agreeth not with the new, 
The absurdity of such a course is here more strongly 
marked than in St. Matthew. There it is mainly, if not 
entirely, the destruction of the old which so unwise a 
mending would entail, that is urged; but here that the 
new is also sacrificed, without any benefit thereby accruing 
to the old; a truth to be brought out yet more vividly in 
the perishing of the wine and the wine-skins together. 
In St. Matthew it is but a piece of new cloth, new, as not 
having yet passed under the fuller’s hands, which is lost; 
while here a new garment is totally sacrificed, a patch cut 
out from it, that so this profitless experiment may be 
tried. The emphasis which the Lord lays on this reckless 
destruction of the serviceable for the sake of the unservice- 
able will come more plainly out when instead of, ‘ ¢f other- 
wise, then the new maketh a rent; we render the words 
as we ought, ‘7¢f otherwise, he will also tear the new ;’* 
destroy it, and that for the sake of the old, which after 

* In the Greek, εἰ δὲ μή ye, kai τὸ καινὸν σχίζει (or better σχίσει), which Tyndale 
had rightly given; ‘for if he do, then breaketh he the new ;’ but which was 
rendered by Beza, who has not seldom exercised an injurious influence on 


our Version, Alioqui et illud novum findit vetus; making τὸ καινόν a nomi- 
native, and supplying τὸ παλαιόν as an accusative governed by σλίσει. 


oa 


174 THE NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, 


all is not profited thereby ; seeing that, after the patch is 
made, the two have no agreement together. The glaring 
contrast, the discord between old and new, rendering the 
garment such as no one would willingly put on, and there- 
fore useless, is the point in the parable here; not as in 
the earlier Evangelists, the energy with which the stronger 
new will inevitably tear itself clear of the weaker and 
worn-out old. 

I return to the words as recorded by St. Matthew. As 
making room for their true exposition and that of those 
other which follow, it may be needful just to notice and 
set aside one strange misconception of their whole mean- 
ing and intention. I refer to their’s who understand by 
the ‘piece of new cloth’ which no man ‘ putteth upon an 
old garment, as by the ‘new wine’ which ‘no man putteth 
into old bottles, the fasts and austerities of John’s disciples 
and of the Pharisees; which Christ would not venture as 
yet to impose on his own disciples, however John and 
the Pharisees might safely impose .them upon theirs ; who 
were more inured and thus better able to bear them. It 
is marvellous to find an interpreter like Hammond content 
thus to explain Christ’s words: ‘ Young novice disciples 
that were not yet renewed by the coming of the Spirit 
upon them, and so were not strong enough for such, must 
not presently be overwhelmed with severe precepts such 
as fasting, &c., lest they fall off and be discouraged.’ 
One is tempted to ask, Were the disciples of John and of 
the Pharisees ‘renewed by the coming of the Spirit upon 
them,’ that they could bear what Christ’s disciples could 
not bear. Maldonatus, an interpreter of greater exe- 
getical talent than Hammond—indeed of the very highest, 
where the necessity of maintaining at all costs Roman 


AND THE NEW WINE IN THE OLD VESSELS. 175 


doctrine does not warp his interpretation—is here in the 
same hopeless confusion. It is not to be denied that there 
were some in old time who had shewn them the way in 
this the perversest of all interpretations. Yet these, some 
are cited below,’ were the exception ; for the most part the 
early interpreters grasped rightly the meaning of Christ’s 
words. Thus in the Greek Church very distinctly Origen, 
Basil the Great,? Isidore, and Cyril;*® and in the Latin 
Hilary,* and Augustine.’ The last sees the highest fulfil- 


* Thus Tertullian of course (Adv. Mare. iv. 11): Humiliter reddens 
rationem quod non possent jejunare filii Sponsi, quamdiu cum eis esset 
Sponsus, postea vero jejunaturos promittens; nec discipulos defendit, sed 
potius excusavit; and yet he too has implicitly given the right explana- 
tion elsewhere, when speaking of the Lord’s Prayer he says (De Orat. 1): 
Discipulis Novi Testamenti novam orationis formam determinavit ; oportebat 
enim in hac quoque specie noyum vinum hovis utribus recondi, et novam 
plagulam novo adsui vestimento. So too Theophylact has missed the 
meaning: ῥάκος οὖν ayvagov ἡ νηστεία καὶ οἶνος νέος ἱμάτιον παλαιὸν καὶ 
ἀσκὸς, ἡ ἀσθένεια τῶν μαθητῶν. It is curious to find Beza consenting to this 
explanation: Ista vero utrique similitudine significat Christus haberi hu- 
mane infirmatatis rationem a Deo, qui non sinat nos supra vires tentari, 
ideoque paulatim militie laboribus suos assuefaciat, quod in ipsis etiam 
apostolis preestitit. 

? The regeneration, as he rightly implies, with the daily renewal which 
the regeneration alone renders possible, constitutes the new vessel, capable 
of receiving the new wine (Hom. in Ps. xxxii.): οἱ μὲν οὖν ἀνακαινούμενοι 
ἡμέρᾳ καὶ ἡμέρᾳ καὶ τὸν καινὸν οἶνον ἀπὸ τῆς ἀμπέλου τῆς ἀληθινῆς χωροῦντες 
ἀσκοὶ εἶναι λέγονται ἐν τῷ Ἐὐαγγελίῳ καινοί. 

5. See Cramer’s Catena, in loc. 

* Phariswos et discipulos Johannis nova non accepturos [dicit] nisi novi 
fierent. 

° Thus Serm. celxvii. 2: Isti ebrii sunt; musto pleni sunt. P debant, et 
aliquid verum dicebant. Impleti enim erant utres novo vino. Audistis 
cum Evangelium legeretur, Nemo mittit vinum novum in utres veteres; spi- 
ritalia non capit carnalis. Oarnalitas vetustas est, gratia novitas est. Quan- 
tocumque homo in melius fuerit innovatus, tanto amplius capit quod verum 
sapit. Elsewhere (Quest. Hoang. ii. 18) Augustine seems to me less firmly 
to grasp Christ’s meaning; while Jerome strangely enough in the very same 
passage (in loc.) gives the two explanations, the wrong and the right, which 
indeed mutually exclude one another ; first the wrong : Quod dicit [Dominus], 
hoc est: Donec renatus quis fuerit, et veteri homine deposito per passionem 
meam, novum hominem induerit, non potest severiora jejunii et continentia 
sustinere precepta. Presently, without any consciousness that he is alto- 


176 THE NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, 


ment of that word concerning the new wine in the new 
vessels in the gifts of Pentecost ; and loves to put this saying 
of the Lord in relation with that which was spoken by 
the mockers then, and yet was deepest truth. ‘These 
men are full of new wine’ (Acts ii. 13).’ 

The meaning, as these are all agreed, is this; No man, 
that is, no man of prudence (for the very consequence 
which He indicates as sometimes following, shews that 
some men do make and have made this mistake), seeks to 
piece out an old garment with a new patch; but when the 
garment is indeed worn-out (for ‘o/d’ here can mean no- 
thing short of this), he perceives that it would be no true 
economy to endeavour with a new piece which would 
not match with the faded and threadbare old, and which 
moreover that worn-out texture would not have strength 
to retain, to fit it for use again. On the contrary, if 
poverty do not hinder (for this is tacitly understood), he 
puts on a garment new altogether, and in this presents 
himself at the bridal feast. They proceed to explain, 
that as such an ancient garment, the great Author of 
all the economies in the Church of God would here 
characterize that elder economy, given by the hand of 
Moses; whereof these obligatory fasts, which men were 


gether changing his ground, he passes on to the right: Veteres utres debe- 
mus intelligere Scribas et Phariswos. Plagula vestimenti novi et vinum 
novum, precepta Evangelica sentienda, qua non possunt sustinere Judai, ne 
major scissura fiat. Tale quid et Galate facere cupiebant, ut cum Evangelio 
Legis pracepta miscerent, et in utribus veteribus mitterent vinum novum. 
1 Serm. xxvi.: Utres novos utres veteres mirabantur ; et calumniando non 

innovabantur, nec implebantur. Serm. cclxvii.: Utres novi erant; vinum 
novum de celo expectabatur, et venit ; jam enim fuerat magnus ille Botrus 
calcatus et glorificatus. So too in one of Adam of St. Victor’s magnificent 
Pentecostal hymns (see my Sacred Latin Poetry, p. 192): 

Utres novi, non vetusti, 

Sunt capaces novi musti. 


AND THE NEW WINE IN THE OLD VESSELS. 177 


now seeking to thrust on his disciples, formed an integral 
part, and of the entire of which they stand as the sign and 
the symbol here. This likening of that elder dispensation 
to such a worn-out garment may seem harshly spoken; 
yet the language is not stronger than that which St. Paul 
uses, Gal. iv. 3,9; nor than that employed in the Epistle 
to the Hebrews (Heb. vii. 18), where the apostle speaks 
of the disannulling of the commandment which went 
before ‘for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof.’ 
‘It would profit nothing,’ Christ would here say, ‘ to seek 
to attach my new as a supplementary patch to that old 
of yours. They would not hold together. My doctrine 
is something different from that which you would have 
it; something more than a mere supplement to yours, to 
make that good, where it is defective ; to repair that, where 
it is out-worn. Itis something which is all of a piece, not 
a righteousness of works, eked out and patched here and 
there with the righteousness of faith, but from head to 
foot a new garment for souls.’ It was exactly such a 
piece of patchwork as this, which the Galatians actually 
attempted, and for which St. Paul chides them so 
earnestly (Gal. iii. 2, and throughout). 


And then, as that first comparison had chiefly to do 
with things, the other which follows, namely of the wine 
and the bottles, has chiefly to do with persons; as that 
with doctrine, something therefore more external, even as 
a garment is worn on the outside of the body, this with 
life, that which is more inward, as wine is inwardly 
received.’ For we must not regard this as a mere saying 
over again what Christ had said already. Our Lord often 

* Bede: Vino siquidem intus reficimur, veste autem foris tegimur. 
N 


178 THE NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, 


repeats Himself (thus Matt. xiii. 31, 32 compared with 
ver. 33; and again ver. 44 with ver. 45, 46; or Luke 
xiv. 28-30 compared with ver. 31, 32; or xv. 4-7 with 
ver. 8-10), but never merely repeats Himself; it is the 
same, but in some novel point of view, in some deeper 
aspect. Still keeping close to the bridal feast, and to 
the images which it suggests, He goes on to say, ‘ Neither 
do men put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break, 
and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish (cf. Job 
Xxxii. 19); but they put new wine into new bottles," and both 
are preserved. No prudent man, who means to keep 
his wine for the feast, pours it new, and not as yet having 
worked off its fermenting strength, into skins old, and 
therefore weak and stiff, and possessing no power to 
expand. If the new piece of cloth was the new doctrine, 
which Christ refused to make merely supplementary to the 
old, the new wine, as was just remarked, will be the new life, 
which they only can contain, who are willing to become 
new vessels—‘ willing to become,’ I have said ; for spiritual 
things in this differ from things natural, that αὐ are old 
vessels at the first,a Paul as muchas ἃ Caiaphas; only among 
these old vessels, some are willing to be made new, and 
thus continent of the new life; while others not only are 
old, but are determined to remain in their oldness, even 
after the renewing powers have been brought nigh them, 
and offered to them for their acceptance; Osheas that 

ἘΝ ἔον οἶνον and καινοὺς ἀσκούς: but both of necessity translated ‘ne’ in 
our Version. Yet the variation in the original is instructive, as helping us 
to seize the distinction between the words. The wine is véoc,—what our 
ancestors called stum, or wine of the present year,—in which the process 
of fermentation has not yet taken place; the bottles or skins (see the Dict. 
of the Bible, art. Bottle), are καινοὶ, ‘ new’ in the sense of unused, such as have 


not through wear and tear lost at once their strength and power of expan- 
sion. See my Synonyms of the New Testament, § 60. 


AND THE NEW WINE IN THE OLD VESSELS. 179 


will not be Joshuas, Jacobs that will not be Israels, and 
Simons that will not become Peters. In the words, ‘ new 
bottles, we have in fact a hint at the mystery of regenera- 
tion; and this language He only had a right to use who 
had power to say also, ‘ Behold, I make all things new’ 
(Rev. xxi. 5). There was a restricted sense, indeed, in 
which Christ’s apostles were ‘new vessels, ‘new cloth, 
even when He took them. They were far newer, at least, 
than those who had grown old in their frauds and hypo- 
crisies, the Pharisees and their adherents. 

There is another point in which this second comparison 
is in advance of the first. In that, namely, of the piece 
of cloth, the new holds itself passive in regard of the old ; 
we can hardly, that is, attribute to it the power of itself 
actually tearing out from the old, however such a rent 
might and would follow on the attempt to combine the one 
with the other. But in this second comparison the new 
wine puts forth an active power for the bursting of the 
old vessels.” Here a new aspect of the truth is presented 
to us, namely, the perilous power which mighty truths 
of God exert, when they are received by men who are 
not thoroughly renewed and transformed by them, who 
remain old men still;—the imminent danger of the truth, 
so far as these men are concerned, being utterly lost, like 
wine spilt on the ground; and the men themselves, like 
the bursten vessels, perishing with it. What a key have 
we here to Peasants’ Wars, Anabaptist and other anti- 


1 A hint of this may lie in the ἄγαφνος of St. Matthew and St. Mark; which 
our Translators have rendered ‘nev,’ but have suggested‘ raw or unwrought’ 
—‘ undressed’ would be still better—in the margin. Bengel gives the true 
intention of the word: Discipulos rudes, novos et integros, nulla peculiari 
discipliné imbutos, sumsit Jesus. 

* Gregory the Great (Mor. xxiii. 11): Quia sancti Spiritfis fervor non 
solum veteri sed etiam nova vité vix capitur. 


N 2 


180 THE NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, 


nomian excesses in old times and in new! On how 
many a saddest page in the history of the Church, in the 
history too of innumerable lives that have made utter 
shipwreck of themselves, do these words throw light.’ 
Keeping in mind the mournful comment upon these 
words which the Church’s history has thus so abundantly 


2 An article in the Zeitschrift fiir Lutherische Theologie und Kirche, 
1866, pp. 240-251, with the title, Hine religidse Bewegung in Finnland, sup- 
plies as mournful a commentary on these words as could well be found. It 
is the miserable record of a religious awakening among the poor neglected 
Lapps and Finns some twenty years ago—which, for want of wise guidance 
being allowed to become merely subjective, and to divorce itself altogether 
from the Word of God as its rule, and from the order of the Church as 
explaining that rule, ended in blasphemous excesses which remind one of 
nothing so much as the frightful extravagancies of the Brethren of the Free 
Spirit in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (see Gieseler, Hirch. Gesch. vol. 
τι. pt. ii. p. 629). It is indeed startling, and at the same time wonderfully 
instructive as shewing the fixed and narrow limits within which error moves, 
to meet not merely the speculations, but not seldom the yery phrases of those 
licentious pantheists, reproducing themselves among the rude and ignorant 
children of the North. A faithful Swedish pastor who sought, but when 
matters were beyond remedy, to bring back these unhappy people to the 
Word and the Testimony, sets down in his Diary their retorts of a single day 
to his godly warnings. I omit a part, and the rest I prefer to leave in his 
own language: Um Gott firchten zu miissen, muss man siindigen; wir sin- 
digen nicht, denn wer den Geist hat, braucht nicht zu sindigen; wir 
fiirchten daher auch Gott nicht. Wir sind die Glieder Gottes, welche Gott 
nicht strafen kann; denn Er kann seine eigenen Glieder weder strafen noch 
verdammen. Wir sind gestorben, und kénnen nicht sterben. Wir haben 
nicht leibliche, sondern geistliche Glieder. Wir sind auf der neuen Erde 
wohnhaft; wir sind geistlich, heilig, gerecht. Wir sind die Bibel, das neue 
Testament, der Sinai. Unser Leib ist das Gesetz; daher haben wir auch 
das Recht zu urtheilen und zu verdammen. Wir sind Gott der Vater, Gott 
der Sohn, und Gott der heilige Geist. Der Sohn hat seine Macht, die jetzt 
bei uns wohnt, verloren. Der Geist in uns hat die Macht zu tédten. Der 
Pfarrer, der nicht liéugnet dass er Fleisch hat, ist sterblich und gehért dem 
Teufel. Wir kénnen das Innere aller Menschen durchschauen, nnd wie 
Christus sagte, Hebe dich weg von mir, Satan, so haben wir auch das Recht 
euch Teufel zu nennen, und mit euch als solehen zu verkehren. Thr ligt, 
wenn ihr sagt, ‘ Vater Unser, der du bist im Himmel!’ Ihr solltet sagen, 
‘Vater Unser, der du bist in der Holle,’ denn so lange ihr unbekehrt seid, 
so ist der Teufel euer Vater. Die Kinder sollen ihren Eltern fluchen, damit 
der Fluch auf diese Weise sich riick wiirtz zu unseren Stammeltern verpflanzen 
kénne—with not a little more to the same effect 


AND THE NEW WINE IN THE OLD VESSELS. 181 


supplied, we may more fully understand that gracious 
unwillingness on the Lord’s part to put the old vessels to | 
this trial, lest they should burst and perish in the process 
of the new wine’s fermentation. His words involve, as I 
cannot but believe, a recognition that even those whose 
service is not the highest, may yet be allowed by Him, 
that many lower forms of service besides the service in 
the freedom of the Spirit will yet find merciful acceptance 
with God. Many an earnest Pharisee, many a rigid dis- 
ciple of John, many an elder brother of the parable, if 
only he has been true to the light which he had, and has 
not had the more excellent way offered to him, and deli- 
berately refused that, shall not be rejected nor cast out. 
I will only observe, before leaving these words, that in 
them are condemned as hopeless, declared to be bound 
over to inevitable failure, not this attempt only, but all 
attempts to combine into one scheme and system hetero- 
geneous materials, having no true affinity with one an- 
other. They refuse to coalesce; one proves too strong 
for the other. It has been often tried. There is such 
evident power and vitality in the great Christian ideas, 
that even those who have refused to accept Chris- 
tianity as a whole have continually sought to borrow 
from it in part; to deck their own, which they will not 
renounce, with shreds and patches derived from it; to 
quicken with sparks from a higher source systems from 
which all proper life, if ever they had such, has long since 
departed. When the Neo-Platonists of the second and 
third centuries sought to give a new currency to the myths 
of an effete heathenism, by making them the vehicles of 
Christian ideas, of truths which would never have stirred 
in the thoughts of men, if Christ had not lived and taught 


182 THH NEW PIECE ON THE OLD GARMENT, 


9 
and died, this was at once a sewing of the new patch 


upon the old garment with which it did not agree, and a 
pouring of the new wine into the old vessels which were 
quite incapable of containing it. The same results have 
in every case followed. As in the material world only 
substances which have affinity to one another will chemi- 
cally unite, so the truth has ever attested itself to be the 
truth by refusing to combine with anything except itself. 


But having thus justified Himself, and in Himself his 
disciples also, the Lord concludes in words which only 
St. Luke has preserved for us, ‘ Vo man also having drunk 
old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old 
zs better. He graciously proceeds, that is, to make excuse 
for the disciples of John (He would scarcely have thought 
it necessary to make one, if the Pharisees had been the 
only ones offended) ; explains how it came to pass that 
these took the offence that they did, could not at once 
find themselves in his doctrine and life. He throws his 
shield over them, lest his disciples, being delivered from 
the assault, should themselves be tempted to become 
assailants in their turn, and to manifest impatience with all 
who failed to recognize and accept at once and without 
hesitation their Lord’s word and doctrine as the highest 
and the best. He will check any such intolerance and 
impatience on their parts. Was it to be expected that 
their own, to which these had been accustomed so long, 
should grow out of favour with them on the instant, even 
though He offered to them something better in its room? 
If the new wine did taste somewhat harsh and rough to 
their palates at the beginning, this was only in the natural 
and necessary order of things; no man used to the old 


AND THE NEW WINE IN THE OLD VESSELS. 183 


straightway desireth the new, even though it be of a 
much higher quality. But let them have time and op- 
portunity little by little to wean themselves from that 
old, and doubtless there would be found among them 
those who would grow into liking of this new, which 
indeed in a higher sense is the oldest of all (Gal. πὶ. 17; 
1 John ii. 7, 8).’ 

Wonderful, and rare as it is wonderful, is the spirit of 
mildness and of toleration for all which is not absolutely 
sinful, so that it shall be allowed to endure till it drop 
away of itself, which speaks out in these words. St. Paul 
entered into his Master’s spirit, and acted in practical con- 
formity with it, when he would do nothing to force the 
Jewish converts to forsake their ceremonial law, earnestly 
as he must have desired to see this serious obstacle to an 
entire fusion of the Jewish and Gentile Churches, this 
perilous thing, liable to so mnch abuse, removed out of 
the way ; but was content to wait patiently till it should 
fall off of itself—as a husk falls off, when the fruit which 
it has protected so long, is at length fully formed. 
Reverence for that which has been consecrated by time, 
with an acknowledgement of the mighty force which 
custom and habit exercise on the spirits of men, and at 
the same time a warning to the disciples not to over- 
look this in their impatient expectation that all men, 
whatever their past training and discipline may have been, 
should accept and embrace a more excellent way on the 
very first moment that it is presented to them, all this 
utters itself in these gracious words. 


1 Bengel: Paulatim mutantur habitus animorum. 


8. THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


Matt . xvii. 1-13; Mark ix. 2-13; Luke ix. 28-36. 


THERE has been no little debate and difference of opinion 
on the relation in which the Transfiguration stands to the 
words of Christ which went immediately before, ‘ Verily, 
I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not 
taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his 
kingdom, or, ‘till they have seen the kingdom of God 
come with power’ (Mark) ; or ‘ tall they see the kingdom of 
God’ (Luke). The point in debate has been this— 
namely, how far the Transfiguration is to be itself regarded 
as a fulfilment of these words ; whether that was a coming 
of the Son of man in his kingdom, a coming of the king- 
dom of God with power; and, if accepted as such, in 
what sense it was such a coming. That the coming of 
which Christ here speaks is not the coming of the Son of 
man to judge the world, of which a little while before He 
spoke (ver. 27), is evident; for He has said that there 
are those present who shall live to see it; that it shall fall 
within the lifetime of some of that generation who are 
the Lord’s immediate hearers. ΤῸ this coming, then, at 
the end of the world to judge the world He cannot refer. 

But are we therefore compelled to find in the Trans- 
figuration the fulfilment of his statement, that some stand- 
ing there should not taste of death till they had seen Him 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 185 


coming 1n his kingdom? [I cannot believe that we are. 
There seem to me, indeed, two most serious objections 
to our doing so. The first is this. Mighty event as 
the Transfiguration doubtless was, and it stands between 
the Temptation in the wilderness, and the Agony in the 
garden, as the culminating point in our Lord’s ministry 
upon earth, still the transient glory of it, even grant- 
ing its unutterable significance for Himself and for the 
Church of all times, fails to satisfy and exhaust language 
so vast as this, ‘the Son of man coming in his kingdom, 
‘the kingdom of God coming with power.” Great as is 
the ‘Transfiguration, it is hardly great enough for such 
. words as these. But, further than this, it seems im- 
possible to think that our Lord can have used such lan- 
guage of an event removed from the moment at which 
He utters it by no more than the interval of a week. 
This is excellently put by Bishop Horsley,’ little favour 
as his own explanation of the passage deserves to obtain : 
‘If the time described as that when the Son of man 
should be seen coming in his kingdom be understood to 
have been the time of the Transfiguration, what will be 
the amount of the solemn asseveration in the text? 
Nothing more than this—that in the numerous assembly 
to which our Lord was speaking, composed, perhaps, of 
persons of all ages, there were some,—the expressions 
certainly intimate no great number,—but some few of 
this great multitude there were, who were not to die 
within a week; for so much was the utmost interval of 
time between this discourse and the Transfiguration. 
Our Lord and Master was not accustomed to amuse his 
followers with any such nugatory predictions. The like 


1 Sermons, voli. p. 39. 


186 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


argument sets aside another interpretation, in which our 
Lord’s ascension and the mission of the Holy Ghost are 
considered as the “coming in his kingdom” intended in 
the text. Of what importance was it to tell a numerous 
assembly (for it was not to the disciples in particular, but 
to the whole multitude, as we learn from St. Mark, that 
this discourse was addressed )—to what purpose, I say, 
could it be, to tell them that there were some among 
them who were destined to live half a year?’ 

For myself, I can find no satisfactory explanation of this 
prediction except such a one as shall recognize its fulfil- 
ment in that mightiest judgment act of the Son of man, 
which the world has yet seen, which, so far as we can 
understand, it will ever see, until his final coming as the 
Judge of quick anddead. Irefer to that tremendous catas- 
trophe, the destruction of Jerusalem,——when, indeed, that 
old Jewish economy passed away witha great noise; and, 
extricated from that wreck and ruin, there emerged what 
it is not too much to call a new earth and a new heaven; 
when the things shaken were removed to the end that 
Christ’s saints might receive a kingdom which could not 
be moved. This event, when the Lord spake, was some 
forty years distant, or more. To men of full age it was not 
then a mere nugatory prediction, that they should live to 
see this event, at once so terrible and so magnificent, the 
close of one son, and the commencement of another ; 
divided from them, as it was, by so many years; even as 
these words of Christ compel us to believe that, if only for 
one apostle, yet for more than one of the disciples then 
standing there, it was fulfilled. The passage will thus 
be brought into instructive relation to other Scriptures, 
on which it will throw, and from which it will receive, 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 187 


light. For example, what other explanation can that 
announcement, ‘ Verily, I say unto you, This generation 
shall not pass till all be fulfilled’ (Matt. xxiv. 34), obtain ? 
A consummation of all things, not, indeed, the final and 
exhaustive one, in some sort only a rehearsal of that, it is 
here declared should find place before that whole genera- 
tion in whose hearing the Lord spake, should have died. 
Again, when speaking concerning John, the Lord says to 
Peter, ‘If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to 
thee?’ (John xxi. 22), this ‘ till I come’ cannot be in- 
terpreted of the final coming; for an ‘If I will,’ spoken 
by those lips, is very much more than a mere expression 
of power, that He could keep John in life if He chose. 
The words must be accepted as expressing not merely 
what He could do, but what He intended to do. It is 
clear, however, that He did not intend this disciple whom 
He loved, to tarry till his final coming; for, not to say 
that there would have been something monstrous in a life 
protracted so, we know the place and date of his death. 
It follows that his ‘ till I come’ must receive another 
interpretation, and that can be no other than one which 
will put that statement into closest connexion with this 
wherewith we are dealing now. Let me observe, before 
leaving this subject, that, accepting the judgment on the 
Jewish Church as a coming of the Lord,‘ all difficulty in 
respect of such passages as Jam. v. 8,9, will at once be 
removed. Yet a little while, St. James reminds them to 
whom he writes, and the tyrannous oppression which they 
endure from Jewish adversaries will have for ever passed 
away; yet a little while, and Christ will have sent his 


* Hammond has more than one able note upholding this interpretation, 
thus here, and on Matt. xxiv. 3. 


188 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


armies, Himself their invisible Captain, and destroyed the 
city of those murderers, and delivered his own from their 
tyranny for ever.’ 

But is there then, it may be asked, no real connexion 
whatever between these words of Christ, and the Trans- 
figuration, which in all three of the synoptic Gospels is 
brought into such close and significant juxtaposition with 
it, which all three are so careful to declare to have 
followed on the seventh day succeeding? A most real 
connexion—the Transfiguration was a prelude and a 
pledge of that which should be hereafter. In that it was 
clearly shown that He spoke not at random, who spoke of 
his kingdom. It was shown that He had a kingdom to 
come in; a glory ready at any moment to burst forth, 
however for the moment it might be covered and con- 


? It must be freely owned that nearly all the early expositors, the Fathers 
and medieval interpreters, findin the glory of the Transfiguration that which 
for them satisfies and fulfils the prediction that has just gone before, ‘ There 
be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of 
man coming in his kingdom,’ At the same time, when their statements are 
closely examined, it will be found that in almost every instance they have 
felt themselves obliged to moderate and temper these, so that the Trans- 
figuration shall in fact be rather a prelude and prophecy of the coming in 
glory than the very coming itself. I quote a few passages in proof. And 
first one or two from the Greek Fathers. Thus Basil the Great (Hom. in 
Ps. 44): εἶδον dé αὐτοῦ τὸ κάλλος Πέτρος καὶ οἱ υἱοὶ τῆς βροντῆς ἐν TO ὄρει, Kar 
τὰ προοίμια τῆς ἐνδόξου αὐτοῦ παρουσίας ὀφθαλμοῖς λαβεῖν κατηξιώθησαν. 
Theodoret (Zp. 145), having spoken of the glories of our Lord’s person and 
vestment, goes on: ἐδίδαξε διὰ τούτων τῆς δευτέρας ἐπιφανείας τὸν 
τρόπον, So too the Latin Fathers. Thus Augustine (1. Zp. ad Gal. 
c. ii.): Ipsis tribus se in monte Dominus ostendit in significatione regni sui, 
cum ante sex dies dixisset, Sunt hic quidam, &e. And Leo the Great (Serm. 
94): In regno suo, id est, in regid claritate. Anselm (Hom. 4): Venientem 
in regno suo viderunt eum discipuli sui, qui in ed claritate viderunt fulgen- 
tem in monte, in qué peracto judicio ab omnibus sanctis in regno suo vide- 
bitur. And in the modern Roman Catholic Church, Maldonatus: Christus Ὁ 
Transfigurationem regnum suum vocat, non quia proprie regnum, sed quia 
Suturi regni imago erat. . . lllad ipsum regnum tres illi apostoli non in ipso 
sed in figuré, non preesens, sed per transennam ostensum viderunt. 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 189 


cealed from the eyes of men, from the eyes even of 
those who were in closest communion with Him. The 
Transfiguration is an earnest in hand of a _ glory 
hereafter to be revealed. 

But while the relation in which the Transfiguration 
stands, and on which the Evangelists lay so marked an 
emphasis, to that memorable prediction of the Lord’s, is 
worthy of our exactest study, it is not less important to 
observe another connexion in which it stands, and in 
which they are all careful to place it, namely, with the 
first distinct announcement which the Saviour has made 
to his disciples, of his sufferings, rejection, and death 
(Matt. xvi. 21; Mark ix. 31; Luke ix. 22), an announce- 
ment which had so greatly startled, surprized, and dejected 
them. For indeed this connexion supplies us with a very 
weighty hint for the right understanding of this solemn 
scene, and of the ends which it was meant to serve, as a 
confirmation of their faith, and as helping them to confirm 
the faith of others. How deep and lasting an impression 
it had made on them we best gather from the fact that 
more than thirty years after, St. Peter refers to it as an 
evidence to himself, an evidence therefore to all who 
received his word, that in declaring to them ‘the power 
and coming of the Lord Jesus Christ,’ he had not followed 
cunningly devised fables (2 Pet. i. 15-19). To them 
who had just heard of the sufferings of Christ there was 
here vouchsafed a prophetic glimpse into the glory which 
should follow, that in the strength of this they might not 
be troubled nor offended at the prospect of these suffer- 
ings now, nor at the sufferings themselves which pre- 
sently should arrive. Nor may we regard it merely as 
an act of condescension to their weakness. This would 


»»....- 


190 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


be to rob the Transfiguration of very much of its meaning. 
For the Lord Himself also this prelibation of glory 
had doubtless its highest significance. It was a mighty 
strengthening and refreshing of Himself, no less than of 
his disciples, against that comirig day of humiliation and 
agony. He did not merely manifest to others that glory 
which should one day be his, but became more fully con- 
scious of it Himself, and that He already possessed it ; 
however He might voluntarily defer its full manifestation ; 
—not to say that in this momentary breaking forth of 
that inward splendour, for the most part hindered and 
restrained by the sackcloth covering of the flesh, there 
was a step in the progressive glorifying of that humanity 
which He had assumed. But it will be better not to 
anticipate what‘will presently find its fitter place. 


‘ After six days Jesus taketh with Him Peter and James 
and John. Not without a meaning is it so carefully noted 
by all the Evangelists that it was ‘ after six days’ (Mat- 
thew, Mark)—the ‘eight days after” of St. Luke being no 
contradiction, but only a different way of counting, leaving 
as it does the six complete days between—that the Trans- 
figuration found place. There are six days of the world’s 
work, which the seventh day’s glory, of which we have _ 
here a foretaste, is to follow. Three of his disciples the: 
Lord takes with Him, that in the mouth of two or three 
witnesses every word may be established (Deut. xix. 15) ; 
these three, the flower and crown of the apostolic band, the 


* Gerhard (Loci Theoll, xxxii. 2): Post dies sex Christus coram discipulis 
transfiguratur; sic exacto hnjus vita sextiduo succedet #ternum sabbatum, 
in quo piorum corpora clarificabuntur. Quid tota hee vita aliud est quam 
sex dies laboris? illos sequetur quies sabbati, et piorum gloria wterna. 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 191 


‘ corypheei,’ as Chrysostom calls them, and not now alone 
favoured above the rest (Matt. xxvi. 37; Luke viii. 51) ; 
they are Peter, who loved Him so much (John xxi. 17), 
and John, whom He loved so much (John xxy. 20), and 
James, who should first attest that death could as little as 
life separate from his love (Acts xii. 1); being the same 
three who should hereafter be witnesses of the deepest 
depth of his humiliation in the Agony of the garden, and 
who therefore were thus fitly forearmed by what they now 
beheld against what they should then behold. 

Having taken these, He ‘leadeth them up into an high 
mountain apart by themselves. The tradition which makes 
Mount Tabor to have been this ‘high mountain, though 
for many ages not so much as called in question, does not 
date farther back than the fourth century, Cyril of Jeru- 
salem’ being the first to mention it. Indeed there is an 
earlier tradition still, which places the scene of the Trans- 
figuration on the Mount of Olives, near Jerusalem,’ but 
one which seems to have obtained little acceptance. Tabor 
having been once fixed on (it probably was so, as the 
highest and goodliest mountain in Galilee, rising in an 
almost perfect cone from the plain,’ and, though unnamed 
in the New, of frequent commemoration in the Old Testa- 
ment; thus see Judg. iv. 6, 14; viii. 18; Ps. lxxxix. 12; 
Jer. xlvi. 18), there were built churches, and presently 
monasteries, on its summit—three of the former to corre- 
spond to the three tabernacles which Peter was not 
permitted to build! But while evidence in favour of 

1 Catech. xii. 16. In the Greek Church the festival of the Transfiguration 
(Aug. 6) has derived its name, Td Θαβώριον, from this tradition. 

* Ritter gives in proof a reference, Itin. Anton. Aug. et Hierosolytanum, 


ed. Parthey, 1848, which I have not verified. 
* Adgog μαστοειδής Polybius (v. 70. 6) calls it. 


192 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


Tabor there is absolutely none, that against it is strong, is 
indeed decisive. ‘The historical data which we possess, 
shew that the summit of the mountain was employed 
without any intermission between the times of Antiochus 
the Great, 218 B.c., and the destruction of Jerusalem 
under Vespasian, as a stronghold, and was by no means 
the scene of peace and solitude whither one would flee, 
anxious to escape the turmoil of the world. The con- 
secration which quiet and seclusion give was only reached 
after the fortresses which once crowned its summit had 
been laid low.’ It is impossible therefore that Tabor 
can have been that ‘holy mountain,’ to which the Lord 
retired that He with his three disciples might be there, 
‘apart by themselves. It may perhaps have been Hermon, 
or one of the spurs of the Antilebanon. But, whatever 
mountain it was, it certainly is not for nothing that this 
and so many other of the most memorable events in Holy 
Scripture find place upon mountains; as the offering of 
Isaac (Gen. xxii. 14), the giving of the old Law (Exod. 
xix.; Deut. xxxiii. 2), and of the new (Matt. v. 1), the 
last decisive conflict between Jehovah and Baal (1 Kin. 
Xviii.), the apparition of the risen Lord (Matt. xxviii. 16) ; 
from ‘a very high mountain’ the vision of the New Jeru- 
salem is vouchsafed to Ezekiel (xl. 2), and to St John 
(Rev. xxi. 10). It was not by accident that in the days of 
his flesh the Lord was wont to withdraw to a mountain for 
prayer (Matt. xiv. 23; Luke xxi. 37; John vi. 15), even 
as, according to St. Luke, it was for prayer that He retired 
to this the mount of his Transfiguration. Towering above 


' Ritter, Comparative Geography of Palestine, English translation, vol. ii. 
Ῥ. 313; compare Robinson, Bibl. Researches, vol. iii. pp. 220-225 ; Herzog, 
Encyclopadie, art. Thabor. 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 193 


the smoke and stir of this dim and lower earth, advancing 
their heads into a purer atmosphere and one nearer to 
heaven, they have in them a sort of natural ‘ Sursum corda,’ 
which constitutes them fittest spots for such nearer com- 
merce with God, or special communications from Him.! 

Being there, ‘He was transjfigured before them, St. 
Luke, writing primarily for Greek readers, avoids this word, 
‘ transfigured, or transformed ; (‘ metamorphosed’ would be 
a still closer rendering), which St. Matthew and St. Mark 
do not shrink from employing. He avoids it, probably, 
because of the associations of the heathen mythology, 
which would so easily, and almost inevitably, attach them- 
selves to it in the imagination of a Greek.” He is satis- 
fied with telling us ‘that the fashion of his countenance 
was altered ;’ adding to this that it was ‘as He prayed’ 
that this marvellous change came over Him (cf. Isai. lxv. 
24; Dan. ix. 21; 2 Cor. iii. 18, where the significant 
word μεταμορφούμεθα occurs). It was a change not 
without its weaker analogies, and prophetic anticipations 
in other personages of Scripture, in Moses for example, 
when the skin of his face shone after he had come from 
talking with God upon the mount (Exod. xxxiv. 29-35) ; 
which circumstance therefore Hilary rightly calls a figure 
of the Transfiguration.’ Another such figure, though 

* Witsius (De Glorif. Jesu in Monte, 7): Sed et ipsa Transfiguratio vide- 
batur montem poscere, eumque sublimem; ut loci ratio responderet con- 
ditioni gloria in qué tune Christus conspiciebatur. 

* Jerome warns against such an abuse of μετεμορφώθη here: Nemo putet 
pristinam eum formam amisisse; non substantia tollitur, sed gloria com- 
mutatur. Anselm: Non formam humani corporis amisit, sed suam suorumque 
glorificationem premonstravit. In naming this great event, the German 
theology, calling it ‘die Verklirung,’ or ‘the Glorification * (it is frequently 
‘Clarificatio’ in the early Lutheran divines), has seized this point, not 


exactly the same as our ‘Transfiguration.’ 
* Figura transfigurationis. 


0 


194 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


not now an anticipation, but a reminiscence of it, the 
martyrdom of St. Stephen affords, when those who looked 
at him ‘saw his face as it had been the face of an angel’ 
(Acts xvi. 15); and how often at the departure of holy 
saints and servants of, God has some such gleam of the 
coming glory been observed to light up their countenances 
even here. 

But in the Lord of glory it was not the countenance 
only, which thus wore a splendour different from the 
common; in addition to this, ‘Ais raiment was white and 
glistering ;’* or, as St. Mark has it, ‘ became shining, ex- 
ceeding white as snow’ (cf. Rev. i. 14), 480 as no fuller on 
earth can white them. Tt was probably night, when this 
marvellous spectacle was vouchsafed to the disciples. 
Such an assumption best explains ‘the next day’ of Luke 
ix. 37. This, if it was so, must have infinitely enhanced 
the grandeur of the vision; although the brightness doubt- 
less was such as would have paled even the noonday sun 
(Acts xxii. 10). Indeed all words seem weak to the 
Evangelists, all images to fail them here. St. Mark, whose 
words I have quoted, borrows one image from the world of 


’ Bengel: ἐξαστράπτων, ab intra, glori4 corporis translucente, et poros 
vestimenti .permeante; compare the ἐκλάμψουσι, which the Lord ascribes 
and promises to his saints, Matt. xiii, 43. ΔΛευκὸς ἐξαστράπτων is not ‘ white 
and glistering’ (E. V.); but ἐξαστράπτων (cf. Ezek. i. 4, 7; Nah. iii. 3) is 
the modal explanation of λευκός, ‘ white,’ and so white that it was ‘glistering’ 
as well. This last word is a happy one; ‘effulgent,’ which hardly existed 
in the language when our Version was made, would not express it as well, 
while ‘fulgurant,’ and ‘effulgurant,’ are too merely Latin words. As 
‘glistering’ in like manner we are to understand the ‘ raiment white as snow’ 
of the angel at the empty tomb (Matt. xxviii. 3); not the garment of inno- 
cence, but of glory; the same angel being described in St. Luke as clothed 
‘in shining garments’ (aotparroicac); so too ‘the great white throne’ of 
Rey. xx. 11 is equivalent to ‘the throne of glory’ of Matt. xxv. 31, for 
light at the utmost intensity is white; from this, too, we may further 
explain Dan. vii. 9; Rev. i. 14. 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 195 


nature, another from that of man’s art and device; by 
these he struggles to set forth and reproduce for his 
readers the transcendant brightness of that light which 
now arrayed, and from head.to foot, the person of the 
Lord, breaking forth from within, and overflowing the 
very garments which He wore; until in their eyes who 
beheld, He seemed to clothe Himself with light as with 
a garment, light being indeed the proper and peculiar 
garment of Deity (Ps. civ. 2; Hab. iii. 4). In the cir- 
cumstance that his glory was not one which was lent 
Him, but his own, bursting forth as from an inner fountain 
of light, not merely gilding Him from without; not play- 
ing, like that of Moses, on the skin and surface of his 
countenance, perhaps also in its being a glory which 
arrayed not his face alone, but his entire person, we have 
those tokens of superiority, those prerogatives of the 
Master above the servants, which we are evermore able to 
trace even in matters wherein one or another of these 
may seem to have anticipated, and thus to have come 
into some sort of competition with Him.’ 

I have lightly touched already, and shall have occasion 


1 Witsius (Melet. Leid. p. 306): Quorsum ea omnia? Et Christi caus, 
et nostri. Christi intererat ut hec ipsi evenirent, quippe quem Pater hac 
quidam celestis gloriw anticipatione ad instans certamen animare constituit. 
Quum difficultates prophetici muneris suscipiends essent, apertura ceeli, 
descensu Spiritts, et compellatione Patris gratissima, mirabiliter animatus 
est (Matt. iii. 16). Nunc quum instaret tempus quo se ut Pontifex Patri 
oblaturus erat sequum fuit ut splendidis vestibus exornatus, ex earum ac 
faciei suze fulgore experiundo disceret, que post sui oblationem gloria ipsum 
maneret in calis. Instabat hora, qué controversia ipsi de regno contu- 
meliosissimum in modum movenda, et regni professio in crimen morte 
piandum imput&nda, regiaque ipsius dignitas infami ludibrio exponenda 
erat. Sed insolité hic plus quam regii splendoris exhibitione clarius demon- 
stravit Rex c#lorum quanto ipsum in honore haberet, quam Assuerus olim 
Mardochwo, in omni isto invidiosa. pompw apparatu, quem ei per Hamanem 
preestari jussit. 


02 


196 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


to dwell further on some aspects, in which the Trans- 
figuration may be regarded as designed to strengthen and 
encourage the hearts first of those who witnessed it, and 
then of all those to whom their witness came. But in 
addition to these it has ever been contemplated in the 
Church as a prophecy of the glory which the saints shall 
have in the resurrection.’ As was the body of Christ on 
the Mount, so hereafter shall their bodies be. It is diffi- 
cult not to recognize a direct reference to the Transfigura- 
tion in the words of St. Paul, where he speaks of Christ’s 
body of glory to which hereafter the body of our humilia- 
tion shall be conformed (Phil. iii. 21); while in passages 
out of number we have hints of the luminous character 
of the future glorified bodies of the redeemed (Dan. xii. 3; 
Matt. xiii. 43; 1 Cor. xv. 43; Col. ii. 45 1 Pet. vo1)3; 
Rey. iii. 4, 5; Wisd. v. 7); all these Scriptures pointing 
to the glorious conformity of their bodies then, with all 
which his body at this time was, who now shewed in 
Himself, as the first fruits of the new creation, what here- 
after He should shew in all them that were his. 

‘ And behold’ (wonder within wonder), ‘ there appeared 
unto them Moses and Elias, talking with Him’? The 


* Leo the Great (Serm. xciv.): In transfiguratione illud principaliter 
agebatur, ut de cordibus discipulorum scandalum crucis tolleretur; sed non 
minore providenti& spes Sancte Ecclesie fundabatur, ut totum corpus 
Christi agnosceret quali esset commutatione donandum, ut ejus sibi honoris 
consortium membra promitterent, qui in capite prefulsisset. Gregory the 
Great (Moral. xxxii. 6): In transfiguratione quid aliud quam resurrectionis 
ultima gloria nunciatur? So in the Greek service-books: δεέξαι βουλόμενος 
τῆς ἀναστάσεως τὴν λαμπρότητα. 

* One of the best and soundest of the Mystics, Richatd of St. Victor, 
warning against visions, and urging the necessity of trying all such by the 
Word of God, of making that the standard by which all subjective revela- 
tions should be tried, whether they were indeed of God, or only delusions 
of the enemy, has some striking admonitions drawn from this presence of 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 197 


question, How the disciples knew these two to be Moses 
and Elias, is surely an idle one ; and the suggestion that 
they gathered their knowledge from the conversation 
which they overheard, or that they recognized the horns 
of Moses, or the ascetic garments of Elias, merely super- 
fluous. That elevation of their whole spiritual life, that 
ecstatic state of a divine clairvoyance, if we may use this 
word without offence, in which alone they could have 
seen these sights at all, will have left them in no doubt 
concerning those whom they now saw, holding this con- 
verse with their Lord. Their recognition of them we 
must regard as immediate and intuitive.’ It is the same 
question as is sometimes asked about Paul, namely, how 
he should have seen in a vision a man whose name he 
knew to be Ananias (Acts. ix. 12). It can only be replied 
that the vision which shewed him the man, imparted to 
him also the name of the man. 

But while this question may thus be dismissed, we 
cannot so dismiss another, namely, why the two who 
appear should be exactly Moses and Elias? It was not 
merely that among all the prophets and saints of the 
Moses and Elias with the Lord in the Mount (Benjamin Minor, |xxxi.): 
Sed si jam te existimas ascendisse ad cor altum, et apprehendisse montem 
illum excelsum et magnum, si jam te credis Christum videre transfiguratum, 
quidquid in illo videas, quidquid ab illo audias, non ei facile credas, nisi 


ocurrant ei Moyses et Elias. Suspecta est mihi omnis veritas quam non 
confirmat Scripturarum auctoritas, nec Christum in sua clarificatione recipio, 


si non assistant ei Moyses et Elias. Compare Thauler, Homilie, 1553, - 


P- 540. 
* As Sedulius (Carm. Pasch. 286) puts it well: 


Ignotos oculis viderunt lumine cordis. 


He proceeds with verses which are worth quoting, on the purpose of their 
appearing : 

Ut major sit nostra fides, hune esse per orbem 

Principium et finem, hune Alpha viderier, hune Q, 

Quem medium tales circumfulsere prophets. 


198 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


Old Testament these were the two, of whom the one had 
not died (2 Kin. ii. 2; ef. Ecclus. 48), and the other had 
no sooner tasted of death than probably his body was 
withdrawn from under the dominion of death and of him 
that had the power of death (Deut. xxxiv. 6; Jude 9); the 
two, therefore, whose apparition in glorified bodies before 
the day of resurrection had less in it perplexing than that 
of any others would have had. This was something ; but 
much more that these two were the acknowledged heads 
and representatives, the one of the Law, the other of the 
prophets; in which Law and prophets the whole Old 
Testament is commonly summed up (Matt. vii. 12)." 

‘ And they were talking with Jesus. What the matter 
of this august conference was only St. Luke tells us, namely, 
that ‘ they spake of his decease,” which He should accom- 


1 It behoved the Lord, in Tertullian’s words (Adv. Mare. iv. 22), cum 
illis videri, quibus in revelationibus erat visus; cum illis loqui, qui eum 
fuerant locuti; cum eis gloriam suam communicare, a quibus Dominus 
glori# nuncupabatur ; oum principalibus suis, quorum alter populi informator 
aliquando, alter reformator quandoque, alter initiator Veteris Testamenti, 
alter consummator Novi. Augustine (Serm. 232): Evangelium testimonium 
habet a Lege et prophetis. Ideo et in monte quando voluit ostendere 
Dominus noster Jesus gloriam suam, inter Moysen et Eliam stetit. Medius 
in honore ipse fulgebat; Lex et prophete a lateribus adtestabantur. Cf. 
Serm. 78: Hie Dominus, hic Lex et Prophet; sed Dominus tanquam 
Dominus; Lex in Moyse, Prophetia in Elia; sed ipsi tanquam servi, tan- 
quam ministri. Ipsi tanquam vasa, ipse tanquam fons. Moyses et Pro- 
phete dicebant, et scribebant; sed de illo implebantur, quando fundebant. 
cf. De Doctr. Christ. ii. 25; Leo the Great (Serm. 94): Quid hoe stabilius, 
quid firmius verbo, in cujus pradicatione Veteris et Novi Testamenti con- 
cinit tuba, et cum Evangelicé doctriné antiquarum protestationum mmstru- 
menta concurrunt? Adstipulantur enim sibi invicem utriusque foederis 
paging, et quem sub velamine mysteriorum precedentia signa promiserant 
manifestum atque perspicuum prasentis gloria splendor ostendit. 

2 Ty ἔξοδον, The word is not without its special solemnity. He who 
has an εἴσοδος (Acts xiii. 24) into the world, has also an ἔξοδος out of the 
world. St. Peter employs the same word of his own ‘decease,’ 2 Pet. i. 15 ; 
ef. Wisd. vii. 6; for a similar use of ἔκβασις, see Heb. xiii. 7; of ἀφιξις, Acts 
xx. 29, Bengel: Vocabulum valde grave, quo continetur Passio, Crux, 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 199 


plish at Jerusalem ;’ of that ‘decease’ prefigured by the 
types of the law (Num. xxi. g; Exod. xii. 46) fore-an- 
nounced by the oracles of the prophets (Zech. xii. 10; 
Isai. lili. 9).} ‘ Decease’ has now become so mere a 
synonym for death, it has so much lost its proper sense 
of departure, i. e. out of this life (decessus), that, as we 
read in the English, we are in danger of missing, indeed 
we can hardly help missing, an allusion which must at 
once suggest itself to every reader of the Greek. We 
fail to mark the relation, which the sacred historian could 
scarcely not have intended us to recognize, between this 
‘exodus’ and an earlier; to recognize in this an ‘ accom- 
plishing’ or fulfilling, as he is careful to note, by the 
Saviour at Jerusalem of an ‘exodus’ (Heb. xi. 22) 
which Moses and Joshua had begun in Egypt and in the 
wilderness, but had not accomplished (Heb. iv.); the 
‘exodus, that is, or going out of God’s people, their 
Captain and Commander leading the way, from this 
present evil world. 

The unity of the Old and New Covenant is wonderfully 
attested in this apparition of the princes of the Old in 
solemn yet familiar intercourse with the Lord of the New; 
and not the unity only, but with this unity the subordina- 
tion of the Old to the New, that ‘ Christ is the end of the 
law’ (Rom. x. 4), and the object to which all prophecy 


Mors, Resurrectio, Adscensio. The Latin excessus, which is an exact 
parallel, has precisely the same more solemn use; thus Cicero (Rep. ii. 30) : 
Post obitum, vel potius excessum Romuli. It is noticeable that Chrysostom 
twice reads δόξαν here; which is not a mere inadvertence, for he comments 
on the word which he thus reads. There is no vestige of any such reading 
having ever existed. 

‘Gerhard (Harm. 87): Institutum itaque fuit colloquium de illo ipso 
articulo, quo apostoli paulo ante offensi fuerant; nimirum de passione et 
morte Servatoris nostri, Jesu Christi. 


200 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


pointed (Acts x. 43; xxviii. 23; Rom. iii. 21), that there- 
fore the great purpose of these had now been fulfilled ; 
all which was declared in the fact that, after their testimony 
thus given, Moses and Elias disappear, while Christ only 
remains. It need hardly be observed what strength there 
was here, and in the remembrance of this scene, for the 
disciples, when they should afterwards behold their Lord 
put to death as a breaker of the law of Moses, as a false 
snatcher to Himself of the words of the prophets. 

‘But Peter and they that were with him were heavy 
with sleep ; and when they were awake, they saw his glory, 
and the two men that stood with Him. These words are 
too often misunderstood, indeed, until the translation is 
corrected, they can hardly fail to be misunderstood. It 
is usual to take the disciples to task for this sleep of theirs 
at such a moment,' and to find a parallel to it in the sleep 
of the same three in the garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 
xxXvi. 40-45). The parallelis altogether misleading. That 
was a somnolence not without its guilt; while they were 
sleeping that untimely sleep, they should have been 
watching and praying, seeking strength for themselves 
and help for their Lord. But that the eyes of the diseiples 
here ‘were heavy with sleep, this might be, and was, an 
evidence of human infirmity—of the inability of this frail 
nature of ours to bear a weight of glory, when it is laid 
upon it, but this was all.” The true parallels to the words 


* Thus Gerhard (Loci Theoll. xxxii. 2): Discipuli somno erant gravati, 
per quem denotatur nostra somnolentia, quod gloriam vite eterne non 
satis estimamus ac meditamur. 

* Chrysostom has a right insight into the matter: imvov ἐνταῦθα καλῶν 
[ὁ Λουκᾶς) τὸν πολὺν Kdpov τὸν ἀπὸ τῆς ὄψεως ἐκείνης αὐτοῖς ἐγγινόμενον 
And Ambrose: Somno gravati erant. Premit enim incomprehensibilis 
splendor divinitatis nostri corporis sensus, 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 201 


before us are Gen. xv. 12; Dan. Χ. 9; Zech. iv. 1; and 
we may add, as materially helping to illustrate what the 
condition of the three apostles was, Num. xxiv. 4. Theirs 
in fact was an ecstatic state, one of a divine clairvoyance ; 
even as in such only would they have been capable of 
beholding what they then beheld; their eyes burdened 
with sleep, but they not asleep ; for having resisted all the 
temptations of this frail nature to succumb under the 
burden of this glory—and what a burden it is to be the 
immediate recipient of any divine revelation Daniel has 
often told us (vii. 28; viii. 27; x. 8, 11, 16)—‘ having 
kept themselves awake throughout’ (for this, and not ‘ when 
they were awake, is the right rendering),' ‘ they saw his 
glory, and the two men that stood with Him. The disciples 
saw this vision, as indeed it only could have been seen, 
“in spirit’-(Acts x.-105* Ki. τ MAM ρον Cor. xiv. 15; 
Rey. i. 10); whether in the body or out of the body they. 
could not, any more than St. Paul in a later ecstasy 
(2 Cor. xii. 3), have told.’ It is from this point of view, 
and keeping this in mind, that we must explain another 
notice which also we owe exclusively to St. Luke—his 
comment, namely, on St. Peter’s proposal which presently 
follows—to wit, that he made it ‘not knowing what he 
said. Tertullian long ago gave the right explanation of 
this ‘not knowing what he said,*® which many have 


1 Avaypyyophoavrec, not vigilantes (Vulg.), nor cum evigildssent (Beza), 
nor postquam experrecti sunt (Castalio), which all are in error. Διαγρηγο- 
péo Rost and Palm rightly render durchwachen, and refer to Herodian, 
111. 4. 8: πασῆς τῆς νυκτὸς διαγρηγορήσαντες. 

3 Compare Philo, Quis Rer. Div. Heres, § 53, who there and elsewhere 
has much to say on the true character of the Scriptural ἔκστασις, which word 
he found in his Septuagint at Gen. ii. 21; xv. 12. 

* Adv. Mare. iv. 22: In spiritu enim homo constitutus, prasertim cum 
gloriam Dei conspicit, vel cum per ipsum Deus loquitur, necesse est excidat 

4 


202 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


subsequently missed.’ It is no apology upon the part of 
the Evangelist for St. Peter’s untimely proposal, still less 
a judgment upon it. Shortsighted, inopportune it may 
have been; and, while testifying for his zeal and for his 
delight in that heavenly communion, in some sense it was. 
This, however, is not what St. Luke would affirm; but 
that he so spake, being out of himself, not indeed demens 
but wmens, rapt into another world, a world of fear and 
wonder, into conditions altogether remote from the com- 
mon; as appears still more plainly in the parallel state- 
ment of St. Mark; ‘for he wist not what to say, for they 
were sore afraid. 

To return, however, to his actual words : ‘Zhen answered 
Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be 
here ; uf Thow wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, one 
70» Thee, and one for Moses, and one for ELlias. This 
- proposal, as St. Luke, again significantly completing the 
other Evangelists, informs us, he made, ‘as they departed 
from Him.” It is too brief a converse, too transient a 
glimpse and foretaste of the heavenly glory. He will 
fain detain these august visitors. Wherefore should all 
these marvels of the higher world be shewn to them, only 
to be withdrawn again in an instant. ‘ Zt ἐδ good for us to 
be here’—better, as no doubt he felt, than to be rejected of 
the Jews, better than to suffer many things of the Elders 
and Chief Priests and Scribes, and be killed (Matt. xvi. 
21). But that holy retirement in which they were was 
sensu, obumbratus scilicet virtute divind.... Interim facile est amentiam 
[=txoraow] Petri probare. Quomodo enim Moysem et Eliam cognovisset 
nisi in spiritu ? 


* Gerhard for example: Hane vocem ex carnali inscitid profectum esse 
Lucas testatur, Non enim noverat quid loqueretur. , 

* A somewhat feeble rendering of ἐν τῷ διαχωρίζεσθαι αὐτοὺς ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ, 
on which Beza rightly comments, e conspectu abrepti. 


‘ 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 203 


‘good, as he esteemed it, not merely as a safe withdrawal 
from all this evil, but also for the sweetness which he 
found in the communion and fellowship which it offered. 
‘But what,’ exclaims Anselm in a sermon of extraordinary 
richness and beauty, from which I have already quoted one 
or two fragments, ‘if the contemplation of Christ’s glorified 
manhood so filled the apostle with joy that he was un- 
willing to be sundered from it, how shall it fare with them 
who attain to the contemplation of his glorious Godhead ? 
and if it was so good a thing to dwell with two of his 
saints, how then to come to the heavenly Jerusalem, to 
the general assembly and Church of the firstborn that are 
written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to 
these, not seen through a glass and darkly, but face to 
face ?’ 

But tarrying on the summit of that mountain they will 
need, as the apostle conceives, that some kind of shelter 
be provided for them; so are things earthly confused 
with things heavenly in his mind. He, ever prompt 
for action, as ready with the labour of his hands as with 
the love of his heart, aided by the other two, will 
quickly prepare some slight booths of the branches of 
trees, or of whatever else may come to hand, in which 
they may tarry: ‘let us make here three tabernacles, one 
for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias.”' That 
there is any allusion here to the Feast of Tabernacles, 
that St. Peter is measuring here the heavenly felicity by 
that poor earthly copy, I cannot for an instant believe ; 
and altogether it seems to me that he is very needlessly 
schooled and found fault with by modern commentators, 
and, indeed, by some ancient interpreters as well, for 


* Ambrose: Impiger operarius communis obsequii ministerium pollicetur. 


204 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


these words of his. At the same time, that there is a 
certain fault in them is unquestionable. In this proposal 
he did not maintain himself at the height of that great 
confession which he had so lately made (Matt. xvi. 16). 
He who could thus speak, even though he meant it 
honourably for his Master, yet plainly declared, thus 
putting those other two on the same level with Him, 
that he did not yet perceive how far that Master 
transcended all other, even the princes of the elder dis- 
pensation, how far higher a dispensation had begun with 
Him ;' herein revealed his own need of the teaching of 
that vision and that voice, which was presently to be 
vouchsafed to him and to his fellows; for we have a 
right to see in what immediately succeeds the answer from 
heaven to that word of his:* ‘while he yet spake, behold 
a bright cloud overshadowed them, not the disciples, but 
the legislator and the prophet, and perhaps also Him that 
was the Lord alike of them both. 

A cloud is the constant symbol, or if not always this, 
the accompaniment, of the divine presence (Exod. xiv. 19 ; 
xix. 10; xxxili.g; xl. 34; 1 Kin. viii. 10; Ps. civ. 3; 

* Jerome: Erras, Petre, sicut et alius Evangelista testatur, Nescis quid 


dicas. Noli tria tabernacula querere, cum unum sit tabernaculum Evangelii, 
in quo Lex et Prophets recapitulanda sunt. Nequaquam servos cum Domino 
conferas. 

* Augustine (Serm. 78.): Videt hoe Petrus, et humana sapiens tanquam 
homo: Domine, bonum est, inquit, nos hic esse. Tedium patiebatur a turbé, 
invenerat solitudinem montis; ibi habebat Christum panem mentis. Ut- 
quid inde discederet ad labores et dolores, habens in Deum sanctos amores, 
et ideo bonos mores? Bene sibi volebat esse; unde et adjunxit, Si vis, 
JSaciamus hic tria tabernacula: Tibi unum, Moysi unum, et Elie unum. Ad 
hae Dominus nihil respondit: sed tamen Petro responsum est. Hac enim 
eo loquente, nubes lucida venit, et obumbravit eos. Ille quewrebat tria 
tabernacula: nobis unum esse, quod humanus sensus dividere cupiebat, 
responsum cwleste monstravit. Verbum Dei Christus, Verbum Dei in Lege, 
Verbum in Prophetis. Quid, Petre, queris dividere? Magis te oportet 
adjungere. Tria queris; intellige et unum. 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 205 


Isai. xix. 1; Dan. vii. 13). There is a manifest fitness in 
the symbol. The clouds of our lower world veil, sheath, 
render tolerable to mortal eyes the splendour of the 
heavens, the brightness of the sun, which otherwise we 
could not endure to behold. But in the Old Testament, 
a ministration of condemnation (2 Cor. ili. 9), the cloud 
is a dark cloud, a thick cloud (1 Kin. viii. 12); for God, 
though in part revealing, is also in part a God that hideth, 
Himself (Isai. xlv. 15); it is often a cloud charged with 
thunder and lightning, and all the dread artillery of 
heaven (Exod. xix. 16; Ps. evii.2; xvili. 12); for there 
was in that dispensation the utterance of God’s displeasure 
against the sins of men. But the cloud which now over- 
shadows these is ‘ a bright cloud,’ yet, bright as it is, still 
serving the purpose of veiling the more intolerable bright- 
ness within, even that of God’s very presence in this the 
Schechina or place of his dwelling; and making possible 
for mortal and sinful men to stand in that presence and 
live, which would else have been impossible for them 
(Exod. xxxiii. 20; Judg. xiii. 22)." 

It may seem strange at first that even to this cloud 
a power of thus overshadowing and concealing should 
be ascribed ; yet it is not really strange; for light in its 
utmost intensity performs the effect of darkness, hides 
as effectually as the darkness would do. Thus see 1 Tim. 
vi. 16,? and compare the words of Milton, ‘dark with 


* Ambrose: Ut apostoli Dei loquentis majestatem interpositd nube ferre 
possent. 

* Anselm, quoting these words of St. Paul, ‘Who dwelleth in light un- 
approachable,’ and then the words of Moses, ‘ And Moses drew near unto 
the thick darkness where God was’ (Exod. xx. 21), and bringing both 
passages into connexion with this present, says profoundly, Illa caligo et 
ista nubes atque illa lux idem sunt, 


206 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


excess of light;’ and of Wordsworth, ‘a glorious privacy 
of light;’ in like manner Philo affirms of the highest 
light that itis identical with darkness (γνόφος), even as it 
is the character of extremes evermore to meet. They 
were hidden in that blaze of intolerable light from the 
eyes of the disciples, who ‘feared as they entered into the 
cloud’ (luke ix. 34), feared with that fear which ever- 
more falls on sinful men when brought suddenly into im- 
mediate nearness with the pure and awful presences of 
heaven. They may have feared too that their Lord was 
now about to be taken from them, to anticipate the day of 
his Ascension, and to mount already the cloud-chariot which 
was one day to bear Him from their sight (Acts 1. 9); for 
the Transfiguration must have made plain to them as to 
Himself that He needed not the painful passage of death 
by which to enter into glory; that if He still laid down 
his life, it was not of necessity, but of freest love. 

And then it must have been fear upon fear, when 
‘behold, a voice out of the cloud, the same voice which 
had once before been heard at the Baptism (Matt. iii. 17), 
and which should salute Him again as He stood on the 
threshold of his Passion (John xii. 28); and thus at the 
beginning, at the middle, and at the close of his ministry, 
‘This is my beloved’ Son, in whom I am well pleased ; 
hear ye Him. This voice is said by St. Peter to have 
come ‘from the excellent glory’ (2 Pet. i. 17); from Him, 
that is, who dwelt in the cloud, which was the symbol 
and the vehicle of the divine presence.? In respect of 

+ ᾿Αγαπητός in St. Matthew and St. Mark; but ἐκλελεγμένος (of. ἐκλεκτός, 
Luke xxiii. 35) seems now recognized as the true reading in St. Luke. 

* St. Peter in this same passage, looking back at the privilege vouchsafed 


to him and to the ‘sons of thunder,’ speaks of himself and them as ‘eye- 
witnesses of the majesty’ (ἐπόπται γενηθέντες τῆς μεγαλειότητος). ᾿Επόπτης, 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 207 


the heavenly salutation itself, the emphasis should not be 
so much laid on ‘ This’ as on ‘ Son; for the true parallel to 
the present salutation of the Son by the Father, with the 
installation of the Son in the highest place of the kingdom, 
is to be found at Heb. 1. 1: “ God who at sundry times 
and in divers manners spake in time past unto the 
fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken 
unto us by his Son.’ He is to be heard above all others, 
because He is not a servant in the house of another, as 
were Moses and Elias, but a Son in his own (Heb. iii. 5). 
In the words themselves of this majestic installation there 
is a remarkable honouring of the Old Testament, and of 
it in all its parts, which can scarcely be regarded as acci- 
dental; for the three several clauses of that salutation are 
drawn severally from the Psalms (Ps. ii. 7), the Prophets 
(Isai. xlii. 1), and the Law (Deut. xviii. 5); and, as we 
shall see, they do together proclaim Him concerning 
whom they are spoken to be the King, the Priest, and the 
Prophet of the New Covenant. St. Peter therefore might 
very fitly declare that in this voice from heaven ‘ He 
received from God the Father honour and glory’ (2 Pet. 
1.17). And first, ‘ This is my beloved Son ;’ but the 
King’s Son is Ilimself the King; ‘yet have I set my King 
upon my holy hill of Sion’ (Ps. ii. 6). And then, “ἐμ 
whom I am well pleased ;’ holy, therefore, harmless and 
undefiled, fairer than the children of men (Ps. xlv. 2), the 


a technical word, too weakly rendered ‘ eye-witness,’ though it would not 
be easy to suggest a better rendering, sets well before us the light in which 
the apostle regarded his and their relation to the things which they were 
permitted to behold. The ἐπόπτης is properly one admitted and initiated 
into secret and holy mysteries, the Eleusinian for example, or any other 
reserved from the common gaze. Such an initiation, he would imply, into 
the secretest and holiest mysteries of all, had been theirs. 


208 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


sceptre of whose kingdom is a sceptre of righteousness 
(Heb. i. 8), for in no other could God take a perfect 
pleasure; and thus the Priest who could and should 
offer Himself without spot to God (Heb. ix.14; 1 John 
iii. 5). But then, further, He is the One whom all are 
commanded to obey: ‘Hear ye Him;’ therefore hence- 
forth the sole Prophet of his Church ; Moses, or the Law, 
has passed away, for that was the shadow and outline of 
good things to come (Col. 11. 17; Heb. vill. §; x.1), while 
in Him is the substance of good things actually present ; 
Elias, or the prophets, has passed away, for in Him all 
prophecy is fulfilled (Luke xvi. 16; 1 Cor. xiii. 8). They, 
belonging as they did to a merely preparatory dispensa- 
tion, vanish ; but Christ, whois the Head of an everlasting 
dispensation, after whom we do nof look for another, 
remains ; and this will explain how it came to pass that 
‘when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save 
Jesus only.’* 

But before accompanying the Lord and his three dis- 
ciples, as they descend again from that Mount of Vision 
to this common workday world of ours, with all its labour 


* I have made more than one citation from a long and interesting passage 
on the Transfiguration in Tertullian (Adv. Mare. iv. 22). Marcion, in his 
assault upon the Old Testament and the old Economy, as proceeding from 
another God than the author of the New, had found in this transaction not 
Christ preferred to Moses and Elias, but Christ honoured and Moses and 
Elias dishonoured. Tertullian’s reply is admirable throughout. Strange, 
he says, if this were intended, that they should appear talking with Him, 
which is an evidence of familiarity ; sharing in the same glory, which is an 
evidence of favour and acceptance. These are some of the concluding words: 
Itaque etsi facta translatio sit auditionis a Moyse et Helid in Christo, sed 
non ut ab alio Deo, nee ad alium Christum, sed a Creatore in Christum 
ejus, secundum decessionem Veteris, et successionem Novi Testamenti. 
Tradidit igitur Pater Filio discipulos novos, ostensis prius cum illo Moyse 
et Helid in claritatis prerogativa, atque ita dimissis, quasi jam et officio et 
honore dispunctis. 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 209 


and suffering and sin, we may pause for a word or two 
on a subject common to all the Evangelists, but on which 
St. Matthew dwells most in detail. ΑἹ] have told us of 
the fear which overcame the three, even while they felt 
it most good and blessed to be there. But amazing as 
had been the sights which they saw, it would appear that 
it was not these so much as the voice from heaven, the 
awfulness of that direct speaking of God with man, which 
man is so little able to endure (cf. Hab. iii. 2, 16; Exod. 
xx. 19; Heb. xii. 19), that brought them to the extremity 
of their fear: ‘And when the disciples heard it, they 
fell on their face, and were sore afraid’—this fear of 
theirs uttering itself, as is so constantly its manner (Gen. 
xvii. 1; Josh. v.14; Judg. xiii. 20; Ezek. i. 28; Dan. 
πε lake °xxiv.: 9; “Acts ix.94;5, Nev. 1:5 17); "in: an 
attitude, suggested by those moral instincts of awe, by 
that sense of his own utter unfitness to stand face to face 
with the holiness of God, which any near revelation of 
that holiness must inevitably awaken in the heart of man." 
To hide the face is the first impulse and instinct of such 
a moment (Exod. iii. 6; 1 Kin. xix. 17); to fall on the 
face is the most effectual way of so doing, and at the same 
time of outwardly expressing the inner conviction that 
for man there is no standing in his own right before 


God. 


+ Witsius (De Glorif. Jesu in Monte, 39): Quoties enim cunque Deus 
suam animis notris majestatem illustribus documentis ingerit, toties nostra 
non vilitatis solum sed et impuritatis et omnigenw indignitatis conscientia 
vivide expergiscitur; unde fit ut ad tam sublimis puritatis et magnifi- 
centissinaw gloris presentiam trepidemus. Neque id solis contingit im- 
probis, quibus formidolosa semper vindicis Dei cogitatio est, sed et piis, 
imo et amicis Dei ac familiaribus, quibus eo venerabilior semper summi 
Numinis majestas est, quo clarius conspicitur ejus bonitas; et qui nunquam 
sibi ipsis magis sordent, quam cum in liquidissim4 se divinw Gloria luce 
contuentur. 


MS 


210 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


‘ And Jesus came and touched them ;’ as He, now the 
Incarnate Word, and once the Angel of the Covenant, had 
touched Daniel (Dan. x. 10), and Jeremiah (Jer. i. 9), and 
Ezekiel (Ezek. ii. 2); as by the hand of a ministering 
spirit He had touched the lips of Isaiah (Isai. vi. 7); as here- 
after, the glorified Son of man, walking among the golden 
candlesticks, He should, under circumstances not unlike, 
touch or lay his right hand once more upon one of these 
same three (Rev. i. 17). And with that touch there goes 
also the reassuring word, that ‘ Fear not, which even 
the holiest need so much, when God has shewn them their 
unholiness, the depths of their corruption, the abundant 
cause which as sinful men they have to fear, cause so 
abundant that no other but He can enable them to lay 
this fear aside (Judg. vi. 23; Dan. x. 12; Matt. xxvii. 5 ; 
Luke v. 10).’ 

An important discourse follows, which the Lord held 
with his three favoured disciples, as they were descending 
from the mount, and leaving all its mysterious marvels 
behind them. And first the charge to silence, the seal 
which was set upon their lips, not to be removed till after 
the Resurrection: ‘And as they came down from the 


1 Witsius: Non caruit successu ea Christi compellatio, quippe qué ex- 
pergefacti velut a veterno aliquo apostoli, accurate omnia circumspexerunt. 
Sed quocunque oculos verterent, nihil eorum deprehenderunt que nuper 
tam admiranda ipsis videbantur. eminem viderunt, nisi solum Jesum, 
sueté forma, solito amictu. Non decebat diutius in terra conmorari Mosem 
et Eliam, quorum ministerium neque cum Jesu magisterio, neque cum 
apostoloruin functione miscendum aut confundendum erat. Discessit 
igitur Moses, discessit Elias; imo siluit vox ipsa calestis Patris, qua semel 
locuta est, ut semper audiatur Filius. Christus ipse deposit’ nupere Trans- 
figurationis gloria ad pristinum servi statum habitumque rediit ; tempora- 
riam enim eam gloriam esse decuit, que non njsi preludium awterne fuit ; 
multaque adhuc perpetienda restabant Obrleto, antequam tern’ illé 
potiretur. 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 211 


mountain, Jesus charged them, saying, Tell the vision’ to 
no man, until the Son of man be risen again from the 
dead. The three Evangelists here remarkably complete 
one another. St. Matthew, thus mentioning the injunc- 
tion to silence, does not mention how well the disciples 
obeyed it; while St. Luke, mentioning the fact of silence 
—‘they kept τέ close, and told no man in those days any 
of those things which they had seen,—does not state that 
this was in obedience to an express command; only St. 
Mark, with his own characteristic fulness of detail, records 
both the express command given by the Lord, and the 
observation of it by the disciples (ix. 9; 10). That ‘ Zed/ 
the vision to no man, implies that they were forbidden to 
reveal what they had seen even to their fellow-apostles 
themselves—a hard precept, yet one which was obeyed 
by them. At the same time, however strict the silence 
which they kept, we cannot imagine that even so the 
vision was only for themselves, and altogether lost upon 
the others. There must have pierced through the whole 
demeanour of these three, as they returned to fellowship 
with the others, evident tokens that they had not been 
for nothing on that holy mount. The others, in one 
way or another, must have been convinced that they had 
seen sights and heard words which had strengthened and 


* "Opava, not in use distinguishable from ὀπτασία (Luke i. 22 ; Acts xxvi. το ; 
2 Cor. xii. 1), or from ὅρασις (Acts ii. 17; Rev. ix. 17), is exactly ‘a vision ;’ 
what a man most truly sees, but sees because God enables him to see it, be- 
cause it is shewn to him; which he sees, as the three disciples saw this vision, 
ἐν πνεύματι, as contrasted with ἐν νοΐ (1 Cor. xiv. 15, 16). So ὅραμα is invaria- 
bly used in the Acts, where alane, with the exception of this one passage, 
it occurs in the New Testament; but there no less than eleven times 
Gil, 31; 1X: 10, 125 X..5, 17; 19,5 Σὶν §5 Xl. 9; Xvi. 9, lo; xviii. 9; of. Gen. 
xv. 1; Dan. ii. 19 ; Exod. iii. 3). 

P2 


212 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


reassured their faith, and must have found in this a 
strengthening and reassuring of their own. 

But out of what motive shall we explain this charge to 
silence, not to be broken until the Resurrection had found 
place (cf. Matt. xvi. 20,21)? Best, perhaps, out of this. 
The mystery of Christ’s sonship should not be revealed to 
the world, till it was attested beyond all doubt, till He 
was ‘declared to be the Son of God with power by the 
resurrection from the dead’ (Rom. i. 4), and by that 
Ascension, which was, so to speak, the necessary com- 
plement of his Resurrection. It could only be a matter 
of dispute, and, resting as it did on his miraculous con- 
ception, of profane discussion, till then. A little more 
light upon this point might have increased the guilt of 
those who rejected and crucified Him; but would not 
have served to bring them to the obedience of faith. 

St. Mark does not merely connect, and bind into one, the 
two statements of his fellow Evangelists; he also adds 
what they have wholly passed over, namely, the perplexity 
which this language of their Lord occasioned them: 
‘ They kept that saying with themselves, questioning one 
with another what the rising from the dead should mean’ 
(cf. John xx. g). Not the rising from the dead, but the 
death which must have gone before, and which could 
alone render a rising from the dead necessary or possible, 
it was that which, running counter to all their prejudices 
and preconceptions, perplexed them so much (Luke xxiv. 
22-24; John xii. 24). Yet on this they do not venture 
to ask any explanation; but on something else closely 
connected with all which they had just beheld. ‘And 
his disciples asked Him, saying, Why then say the 
Scribes that Elias must first come?’ That momentary 


THE TRANSFIGURATION. 213 


glimpse which had been vouchsafed to them of Elias 
reminded them of the place which he occupied in the 
economy of salvation (Mal. iv. 5, 6). They had seen 
him, but only for an instant. That transient glimpse 
could not satisfy the largeness of prophetic announce- 
ments about him. How are they to understand his 
disappearance, that they are returning with their Master 
alone? How was this to be reconciled with a cardinal 
point in the Jewish theology, namely, that Elias should 
go before the Messiah? nay, how was it reconcilable with 
their Master’s claims to be the Messiah? The reference 
to what the Scribes said on this matter, leads us to gather 
that these urged, as a capital and decisive objection against 
his Messiahship, that no Elias went before Him; while 
yet the prophecies of the Old Testament had solemnly 
closed with a pledge that Elias, going before, should 
prepare the way of the Lord. This stumbling-block 
to their faith the Scribes may have laid in the way of the 
disciples. Will their Lord graciously remove it out of 
their path ? 

The great Interpreter of prophecy gives right to that 
interpretation of the prophetic word which the Scribes 
maintained: ‘ Hhas truly shall first come, and restore 
all things. But I say unto you, That Elas is come already, 
and they knew him not, and have done unto him whatso- 
ever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer 
of them. Then the disciples understood that He spake 
unto them of John the Baptist. Elias had first come. 
Whether he had so come in the person of John the 
Baptist, as that he should not hereafter come in his own, 
whether the prophecy of Malachi found in ‘him its eav- 
haustive fulfilment, and not a partial and initial one only, 


214 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 


is a question than which few in modern times have more 
divided interpreters ; but one upon which it is unnecessary 
here to enter, as not 1 mediately belonging to the matter 
in hand. Enough t in John the Baptist that word 
YY AK en had found @ fulfilment; whether 
auluent awaits it, this still remains to be seen. 


9. JAMES AND JOHN OFFERING TO CALL 
FIRE FROM HEAVEN ON THE SAMA- 
RITAN VILLAGE. 


Luke ix. 51-56. 


We have here one of the memorable incidents of our Lord’s 
last journey to Jerusalem: ‘ And it came to pass, when the 
time was come that He should be received up, He stedfastly 
set lus face to go to Jerusalem. Ishould prefer to render 
the second clause of this sentence, ‘ when the days of his 
Assumption’ were fulfilled’ Such a rendering would 
not lose nor dissolve, as does our present, that word at 
once so solemn and so sweet, with which the Evangelist 
mitigates, even as imagination in these things is so potent 
to mitigate, the bitterness of his Lord’s passion and death; 


*Some understand by our Lord’s ἀνάληψις, which is spoken of herg, his 
ready acceptance among men; and make the Evangelist to say that the 
days of this his acceptance were completed, had now come to an end; which 
he proceeds to illustrate and to prove by the churlish refusal on the part of 
the Samaritans to receive Him now, as contrasted with the glad acceptance 
which He found from them at an earlier date (John iv. 39-42). But this 
is certainly a mistake. It is true that ἀνάληψις occurs only here in the New 
Testament, so that its meaning in Scriptural Greek cannot be fixed by a com- 
parison of other passages where it appears; but ἀναλαμβάνεσθαι is the solemn 
‘word everywhere employed to express our Lord’s taking up into heaven 
(Mark xvi. 19; Acts i. 2, 11, 22; 1 Tim. iii. 16), and in like manner to 
express that which was, so to speak, the rehearsal of this, namely, the rap- 
ture of Elias in the Old (2 Kin. ii. 10; 1 Mace. ii. 58; Ecclus. xlviii. 9); and 
in the same sense an apocryphal Jewish book bears the title, ᾿Ανάληψις 
Μωσέως. See Suicer, Thes., 8. v. ἀνάληψις. 


216 JAMES AND JOHN OFFERING TO CALL FIRE 


looking on as he thus does to the issue and the end, 
to the taking up of Christ into heaven, to his reception 
in his heavenly home and into his Father’s glory. In 
that ‘ stedfastly set his face’' is implied that He addressed 
Himself to this work, as One whom no threatenings of 
his adversaries should arrest, no difficulties nor dangers 
turn away from the accomplishment of his purpose. 
The disciples at first followed trembling, as we plainly 
gather from Mark x. 22. He Himself, as there described, 
‘went before them,’ after the manner of some leader who 
heartens his soldiers by choosing the place of danger for 
himself.’ 

‘And sent messengers before his face, probably ‘two and 
two, as He afterwards sent the Seventy ‘into every city 
and place, whither He Himself would come’ (Luke x. 1); 
and yet, seeing that He was not sent but to the lost sheep 
of the house of Israel, not now to prepare his spiritual 
way, but simply as harbingers, to use that word in its 
most proper sense. ‘And they went, and entered into a 
village of the Samaritans, to make ready® for Him; and 
they did not receive Him, because his face was as though 
He would go to Jerusalem. This refusal of theirs was 
no piece of ordinary inhospitality, such as the Samaritans 
‘were wont to shew to Galilean pilgrims on their way to 
the feasts at Jerusalem.* It was not merely as such a 


1 Ἑστήριξε τὸ πρόσωπον: cf. Jer. xxi. 10; Ezek. vi. 1; xxviii. 21. So 
τάσσειν τὸ πρόσωπον (2 Kin. xii. 17); ἑτοιμάζειν τὸ πρόσωπον (Ezek. iv. 3); 
ἐφιστάναι πρόσωπον (Lev. xvii. 10). But St. Luke makes probably here 
especial allusion to Isai. 1. 7: ἔθηκα τὸ πρόσωπόν μου ὡς στερεὰν πέτραν. 

? More intrepidi ducis, as Grotius puts it well. 

5 “Ἑτοιμάσαι to which we may supply ξενίαν, this phrase ἑτοιμάζειν ξενίαν, 
to prepare a lodging, occurring Philem. 22. 

‘ The enmity even to these ordinary pilgrims reached often much further 
than to a mere refusal of these common rights of hospitality. Josephus (B. J. 


FROM HEAVEN ON THE SAMARITAN VILLAGE, 217 


pilgrim, that they shut their doors against Him; but this, 
we must remember, was Christ’s solemn progress from 
Galilee to Judzea as Messiah, with these messengers every- 
where announcing Him as such. But, as they esteemed 
it,a Messiah going to Jerusalem to observe the feasts there, 
did by this very act proclaim that He was no Messiah ; 
for oa Garizim, as they believed, the old Patriarchs had 
worshipped! (John iv. 20), consecrating it to be the holy 
mountain of God—which therefore, and not Jerusalem, 
the Christ, when He came, would recognize and honour 
as the central point of all true religion. 

There is no need to suppose John and James to have 
been themselves the ‘messengers, or harbingers, who 
endured this repulse. The two sons of Zebedee were 
more probably with their Lord, formed part of his imme- 
diate retinue, at the time when some others brought back 
the tidings of the village which, refusing to receive Him, 
had missed the opportunity of entertaining, not angels 


ii. 12. 3-7) relates at full the bloody retaliations with which, during the 
governorship of Quadratus, some of the fiercer sort of the Jews avenged the 
murder of a Galilwan pilgrim, or of several Galilean pilgrims, as he states 
it in another account (Antt. xx. 6.1), wasting a whole district with a 
slaughter which spared none, and, as the sons of Zebedee would fain have 
here done, destroying with fire the villages of these hateful schismatics. 
The treacherous lyings in wait on the part of the dwellers in Samaria 
which called forth these bloody reyenges will have begun very early, if, as 
St. Jerome’s Hebrew teacher assured him, they were already denounced by 
the prophet Hosea (vi. 8, 9): Quorum quum intelligentiam querebam ab 
Hebrao, ita nobis expositum est. Sacerdotes Bethel, imo fanatici Bethaven, 
temporibus Paschw et Pentecostes et Scenopegiw, quando per Sichem eun- 
ἄστη erat ad Hierosolymam, ponebant in itinere latrones, qui insidiarentur 
pergentibus, ut magis vitulos aureos in Dan et Bethaven quam in Hieroso- 
lymis et in templo adorarent Deum. Wetstein (on John iv. 20) gives some 
specimens from Jewish books of the courtesies by word of mouth which 
were wont to be exchanged between the Samaritans and the Jewish pilgrims 
who passed through the land on their way to Jerusalem. 
* See p. 107. 


218 JAMES AND JOHN OFFERING TO CALL FIRE 


but the Lord of angels, unawares. Upon this provocation 
all their suppressed and smouldering indignation againss 
the schismatics in whose territory they were journeying, 
breaks forth. At this instance of contempt shewn to 
their Lord and to themselves (for no doubt a feeling of 
personal slight mingled with their indignation, however 
little they may have been themselves aware of this), the 
‘sons of thunder,—sons of thunder indeed, as Jerome 
exclaims,'—will fain play Old Testament parts. They feel 
that a greater than Elias is here; for they are fresh from 
the Mount of Transfiguration, where they had seen how 
the glory of the great prophet of the Old Covenant paled 
and waned before the brighter glory of Him whom they 
served, the Lord of the New (ver. 28-36); an outrage 
therefore against Him, and a rejecting of Him, should 
therefore be not less terribly avenged. 

Out of their sense of this, ‘they said, Lord, wilt Thou 
that we command fire to come down from heaven, and con- 
sume them, even as Elias did?’ Their allusion is, of 
course, to the destruction of the two scornful captains with 
their fifties by the fire which Elijah called down upon 
them (2 Kin. i. 10,12). If he spared not those of his 
own people, should they shrink from executing judgment 
on heretical S°~.uritans ?? With all of carnal and sinful 
which mingled with this proposal of theirs, yet what in- 
sight into the dignity of their Lord, and the greatness of 
the outrage which was an outrage against Him, does it 
reveal; what faith in the mighty powers witb ‘which He 

Α wats 


* And Ambri 1 enim mirun, fili- 4 fulgurare yoluisse ? 
? Jerome ye. 5): Κ51 juriam ignis descendit de 
clo, οὗ Ὁ \aritas incendium, quanto magis ad 


contemp iy iii Dei in. .ebet flamma venire ? 


FROM HEAVEN ON THE SAMARITAN VILLAGE. 219 . 


was able to equip his servants ! How mighty a power this 
was in the eyes of one of these two is evidenced from the 
fact that, when in the Apocalypse he records the great 
wonders and lying signs of the false prophet, the only 
sign which he specially names is, that ‘he maketh fire 
come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of 
men’ (Rev. xiii. 13). And yet it might almost seem as 
though, with all this confidence of theirs, there was a 
latent and lurking sense upon their part of a certain 
unfitness in this their proposal; and thus, out of no 
desire to intrude into their Lord’s office, but only out of 
a feeling that this avenging act might not exactly become 
Him, they proffer themselves as the executors of the 
judgment. It will become the servants, though it would 
not perfectly become the Lord. 

Already, as would seem, He who was the pattern of a 
perfect patience had turned to go, that He might seek 
in another village the hospitality denied Him in this. 
They meanwhile had lingered behind, loath to leave the 
guilty village altogether unpunished. But now on 
this word of theirs, ‘He turned, and turning ‘rebuked 
them: Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of-* 
We must beware here of extenuating these words of our 
Lord, as though ‘what manner of spirit’ did but signify 
‘what temper; so that they might be paraphrased 


‘The emphasis in the English sentence should be on the second ‘ye.’ 
The emphatic position of the ὑμεῖς at the end of the sentence, which it 
would have been hard to reproduce in English, which our Version has not 
attempted to reproduce, and, indeed, its introduction at all, sufficiently in- 
dicates this. Bishop Andrews well: ‘Vos is no idle word. It makes a 
plain separation between them and Elias. You, why you are of my spirit. 
The disciple and the Master are of one spirit. But if ye be of my spirit, 

ely spirit is in specie columba, not aguile; not of the eagle that carrieth 
Jupiter’s thunderbolt, but of the dove that brings the olive-branch in her 
bill.’ 


220 JAMES AND JOHN OFFERING TO CALL FIRE. 


thus—‘ Ye know not that ye are speaking out of your 
own hasty passionate temper, being hurt as much by 
the slight upon yourselves as that put upon Me,’ even 
while ye suppose ye are zealous for my glory and for 
nothing else.’ But ‘spirit’ here means not the spirit of 
aman; not his own spirit, but rather the spirit of God; 
and the saying is a far weightier one than such an 
extenuation of its sense would leave it. ‘ You are missing,’ 
Christ would say, ‘your true position; which is, having 
been born of the spirit of forgiving love, to be ruled by 
that spirit, and not by the spirit of avenging righteousness. 
You are losing sight of the distinction between the Old 
Covenant and the New, missing the greater glory of the 
latter, and that it is the higher blessedness to belong to 
it.” Thus Hammond rightly: ‘Christ tells them they know 
not of what spirit they are, that is, they considered not 


under what dispensation they were.” 


* Thus O. a Lapide: Nescitis quis spiritus vos impellat; putatis enim vos 
a Spiritu Dei agi, cum agamini spiritu humano impatientia et vindicte. 

* The εἶναί τίνος of the original, expressing as it does a relation of de- 
pendence of one upon the other, Augustine (Con. Adimant. 17) gives rightly, 
cujus spiritds jilii estis. This whole clause, οὐκ οἴδατε οἵου πνεύματός ἐστε 
ὑμεῖς, is wanting, as is well known, in many, indeed in most, of the primary 
authorities, in A, B, and ©, being therefore omitted by Lachmann and 
Tischendorf. I cannot for all this believe it to have no right to a place in 
the text. It is found in D, in several early Versions and Fathers; and 
not to urge, Who could have ventured,—we may confidently ask—Who 
would have been able, to invent words so exactly touching the central point 
of the whole matter as these do? This marvellous fitness of theirs seems 
of itself to preclude the notion of an unauthorized insertion; while, on the 
other hand, the temptations were many to an unauthorized omission of 
them. Hastily and superficially regarded, they might seem to favour a 
Manichwan antagonism between the Old Testament and the New, to involve 
a slight on Elias, as though his spirit was contrary to the spirit of 
Christ and to that which Ohrist’s disciples ought to entertain. We know 
that out of some such feeling as this, the words of the verse preceding, 
ὡς καὶ ᾿Ηλίας éxoins, the genuineness of which nobody calls in question, are 
omitted in some MSS., in the Codex Vaticanus itself? Add to all this that 


FROM HEAVEN ON THE SAMARITAN VILLAGE. 221 


It behoves us to see clearly that there is no slight cast 
here on the spirit of Elias. Both spirits, that which 
breathed through and informed the prophets and saints 
of the Old Covenant, as well as that which should inform 
the disciples of the New, are divine." The difference be- 
tween them is not of opposition, but only of time and of 
degree. The spirit of the Old Testament was a spirit 
of avenging righteousness; God was teaching men by 
terrible things in righteousness his holiness. But the spirit 
of the New Covenant, not contrary but higher, is that of 
forgiving love; in it He is overcoming man’s evil with 
his good. There was, indeed, pardoning grace in the Old 
(Mice. vii. 18; 2 Kin. vi. 21, 22), even as there is avenging 
justice in the New; fire does come down from God out 
of heaven and consume his enemies (Rev. xx. 9; ef. 
xi. 5); in it too ‘God is a consuming fire’ (Heb. xii. 
29); and that same Lord who spake these words shall 
be Himself revealed in flaming fire to take vengeance on 


such an abrupt termination as στραφεὶς dé ἐπετίμησεν αὐτοῖς is nearly, if not 
quite, inconceivable. Christ cannot but have put his disciples in a right 
point of view for understanding the error into which they had fallen. Yet, 
if we omit this clause, we must then conclude with these words, ‘ And He 
turned and rebuked them ;’ seeing that those which follow, ‘for the Son of 
man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them,’ do certainly possess 
no right to a place in the text, having been brought in from Matt. xviii. 11; 
Luke xix. 20. 

’ The severity of the God of the Old Testament on that occasion, and 
the lenity of Christ on this, with his distinct refusal to do, or to suffer his 
servants to do, ‘as Elias did,’ was one of Marcion’s favourite autitheses, or 
contradictions between the Old Testament and the New, by the aid of which 
he sought to prove that they could not have come from the same Author. 
Tertullian (Adv. Mare. iv. 23) replies: Agnosco Judicis severitatem » 6 con- 
trario Christi lenitatem increpantis eandem animadversionem destinantes 
discipulos super istum viculum Samaritarum. Agnoscat et hereticus ab 
eodem severissimo Judice promitti hance Christi lenitatem: Harundinem 
quassatam non comminuet, et linum fumigans non extinguet. Talis utique 
multo magis hormines non erat crematurus. Nam et tunc ad Heliam, Non 
in igni (inquit Dominus), sed in spiritu miti. 


22 JAMES AND JOHN OFFERING TO CALL FIRE 


them that know not God (2 Thess. i. 8); even now 
severity and goodness go hand in hand.’ At the same 
time each economy has one predominating tone, from 
which it takes its character.’ 

The two apostles, however, were for the moment failing 
to recognize this. In a confusion of the Old and the 
New, in a not knowing of ‘what manner of spirit’ they 
were, ‘they had fallen back on the rudiments οἵ - God’s 
education of his people, when it was their privilege to go 
on unto perfection, and to teach the world the far greater 
might of meekness and of love; even as it is deeply in- 
teresting to remember that it was one of these very two 
who brought somewhat later to the inhabitants of Samaria 
the perfect gifts of the Holy Ghost (Acts viii. 14; ef. 
2 Cor. xiii. 10). They did not understand that there 
was blood which should speak better things than that of 
Abel (Heb. xii. 24). The blood of Abel cried well, when 
it cried for vengeance (Gen. iv. 10), since vengeance, or 
in other words, the violent restoration of the disturbed 
balances of justice, is the Lord’s (Rom. xii. 19); but the 
blood of Christ spake even better things, for it spake of 
pardon and forgiveness, the pardon and forgiveness 
even of those by whom that blood had been shed. In 
their missing of all this there was a fault and matter of 


* Grotius: Habet quidem et Evangelium sua ultime necessitatis tela, que 
in Ananiam Petrus, in Elymam Paulus exercuit; sed usi iis sunt apostoli, ubi 
nulla gsse suspicio poterat iracundisw semet sub Dei obtentu vindicantis; usi 
sunt in prefracte τη 8} 1019 homines, quibus nulla species ignorantiw patro- 
cinabatur. 

* Augustine (Con. Adim. 17): Nam hee est brevissima et apertissima 
differentia duorum Testamentorum, timor et amor. Illud ad veterem, hoe 
ad noyum hominem pertinet; utrumque tamen unius Dei misericordissima 
dispensatione prolatum atque conjunctum. 


FROM HEAVEN ON THE SAMARITAN VILLAGE: 223 


blame, yet blame by no means so severe as some are 
disposed to ἅμα. They were rebuked for choosing that 
which, perfectly good in its own time, was only not good 
now, because a better had come in, for returning to the 
lower level of the Old Covenant, when Christ had lifted 
them up to the higher level of the New. I quote from 
a sermon of Bishop Andrews—it is one of those referred 
to in the last note: ‘ Elias’ spirit, I hope, was no evil spirit. 
No; but every good spirit, as good as Elias’, is not for 
every person, place, or time. Spirits are given by God, 
and men inspired with them, after several manners, upon 
several occasions, as the several times require. The times 
sometimes require one spirit, sometimes another. Elias’ 
time, Elias’ Spirit. As his act good, done by his spirit, so 
his spirit good in his own time. The time changed ; the 
spirit, then good, now not good. But why is it out of 
time? For “the Son” of man is come. As if He should 
say, Indeed, there is a time to destroy (Hecles. 111. 3) ; 
that was under the law, cgnea lex, the fiery law, as Moses 
calls it; then a fiery spirit would not be amiss. The 
spirit of Elias was good till the Son of man came, but 
now He is come, the date of that spirit is expired. When 
the Son of man is come, the spirit of Elias must be gone; 
now specially, for Moses and he resigned lately in the 
Mount. Now no lawgiver, no prophet, but Christ.’ 


* This incident furnished a favourite text to the English divines of the 
seventeenth century for sermons on the anniversary of the Gunpowder 
Treason. Andrews, Jeremy Taylor, Allestree, Tillotson, and many more, 
have found here their argument. Yet, faulty as the two disciples were, their 
fire from above resembled so little the fire from beneath which the incendiaries 
of the Gunpowder Plot would have kindled, that one must needs think they 
are used somewhat hardly in being brought, with whatever explanations, 
into any comparison with them. 


224 JAMES AND JOHN OFFERING TO CALL FIRE, ETC. 


‘And they went to another village ; probably not this 
time a Samaritan one,’ and found, as we gather from the 
narrative, the hospitality there which had been refused 
them in the first. 


5 It is ἑτέραν, not ἄλλην, 


10. THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 


Luke x. 17-20. 


Some have supposed that for the convenience of his narra- 
tive St. Luke omits, or rather defers, various intermediate 
events, and links the return of the Seventy directly with 
their sending forth. Others, who will not allow that there 
is any such overpassing of intervening incidents, assume 
that the return of some at least of their number may 
have followed closely on their sending forth—so closely 
that nothing which the sacred historian desired to record 
happened in the interval. The question is not a very 
important one, nor is it easy to come to any decision about 
it. But whether sooner or later, those whom Christ had 
sent forth, ‘returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even 
the devils are subject unto us through thy name. It will 
be observed that in his charge to the Seventy (ver. 2-16) 
our Lord had given them no distinct commission to cast out 
devils, as He had to the Twelve (Matt. x. 8; Luke ix. 1) ; 
but some tentative efforts of theirs, some ventures of faith 
in this direction, even without distinct authority, had 
been crowned with success. An acknowledgment that 
this at once surpassed their commission and their hopes 
seems to lie in that utterance of theirs, ‘ Lord, even the 
devils are subject unto us; not diseases only, over which 
Thou gavest us power (ver. 9), but the devils as well. 
Q 


226 THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 


The work, in which a little while ago apostles themselves 
were foiled (ix. 40), has not lain beyond the limits of our 
powers, has not baffled us.’ 

Such exultation was most natural; yet was there in it 
something of peril for those who entertained it, and for 
their own spiritual life. One need not exactly affirm 
that ‘through thy name’ comes in only as a formal and a 
saving clause at the end, and that the entire emphasis of 
the passage lay really on what preceded— are subject unto 
us ;’* still there may have been something of this; it could 
scarcely have been otherwise. There is, indeed, nothing 
more perilous for a man than the first discovery that 
spiritual powers wait upon his beck, that he too can 
wield the powers of the world to come; lest he should 
find in this a motive to self-elation, instead of giving all 
the glory to God. The disciples at the present moment 
were exposed to this temptation, as we might conjecture 
even if we had only these words of theirs; but as is 
certain, when we put together with these the words of 
earnest warning which the Lord presently addresses to 
them (ver. 20), suggesting to them a safer and a truer 
joy than that which they were now too incautiously 
entertaining. } 

Yet while we must needs recognize a certain self- 
satisfaction and self-elation, which mingles with, and 
makes itself felt in, this report which they bring back of 
the successes of their ministry, this will not warrant the 
interpretation made by some, of Christ's words which 

* Augustine (Znarr. in Ps. xci.): Redeuntes dixerunt, Domine, ecce da- 
monia nobis subjecta sunt. Dixerunt quidem, in nomine tuo; sed ille videt 
in eis quia in ipsa glorificatione gaudebant et extollebant se, et ibant inde in 


superbiam, et ait illis, conservans nomina illorum apud se, Nolite gaudere in 
hoc; gaudete autem quod nomina vestra sunt scripta in calis. 


THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 227 


follow; ‘ And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as light- 
ning fall from heaven. Here, they urge, is a warning 
to the disciples against that sin of pride which their Lord 
detected in them; as though He had said, ‘ Be not lifted 
up; beware of the first beginnings of a sin, which may 
end in so fearful a catastrophe as that which I once 
beheld ’—beheld, that is, in his preexistent glory and 
before the world was—the fall, namely, of one through 
pride even from the height of heaven itself. ‘Swift and 
sudden as the descent of the lightning was that fall, from 
the highest to the lowest, from a throne of light even to 
the blackness of darkness for ever. And even such a 
casting down may be yours, if you forget your humility, 
and are lifted up in heart.’' I cannot so take the words. 
The warning I believe to be reserved for ver. 20, and 
that for the present the Lord freely shares in their joy, 
even as his own presently breaks forth, at these tidings 
of the great things that they had wrought (ver. 21, 22). 
Any interpretation of this passage seems to me altogether 
at fault, which makes it say other than what the Saviour 
on another occasion said, ‘ Vow is the judgment of this 
world, now shall the prince of this world be cast out’ 
(John xii. 31), or, ‘cast down,’ as some read, which 
would bring that passage into yet closer verbal connexion 
with this.” 


* So Gregory the Great (Moral. xxiii..6) : Mire Dominus, ut in discipulorum 
cordibus elationem premeret, mox judicium ruing retulit, quod ipse magister 
elationis accepit; ut in auctore superbie discerent, quid de elationis vitio 
formidarent. Compare Ambrose, De Fugd Sec.7; Bernard, Jn Ded. Eccles. 
Serm. v. 6; Stella: Quare Dominus Jesus, ut optimus medicus animarum, ut 
roboraret suorum discipulorum animos adversus pestiferum morbum inanis 
gloriz, proponit exemplum Luciferi, qui ob superbiam a tant4 et tam suprema 
felicitate dejectus est, quia de donis a Deo acceptis insolenter gloriatus est. 

2 Κάτω βληθήσεται,. instead of ἐκβληθήσεται : but there is no suflicient reason 
for disturbing the received: reading. 


Q 2 


228 THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 


Those who understand the Lord to allude to that great 
original fall of the ‘son of the morning,’ anterior to the 
fall of man, yet do not all accept the words in the same 
sense. Some make them to contain that warning against 
pride which has just been mentioned. Others find in 
them equally a check to the undue elation of the dis- 
ciples, but from another point of view: ‘ Think not so 
much of these petty exorcisms which you have been per- 
mitted to achieve.' I have seen another sight; the very 
prince of the whole kingdom of wickedness, and him in 
whose defeat the defeat of each one of his subordinate 
ministers was involved, cast out from heaven itself,y— 
with, of course, the underthought of having been Himself 
the victorious author of his defeat. The supporters of 
these expositions commonly urge that no other satisfies 
the words ‘ from heaven ; Satan, they say, may at a later 
moment have fallen into a deeper depth than before, 
but how fallen ‘from heaven’ in the days of Christ’s 
flesh? how could He speak in this language of any fall 
of Satan which He was only now beholding, seeing that 
long since, at the instant of his first sin, he had been cast 
out from his first habitation (Jude 6), from his place 
among the ‘sons of God’ (Job xxxviii. 7), in the heavenly 
places? But this difficulty arises from giving an em- 
phasis to the word ‘ heaven, which it was not intended 
to bear, and which in this very chapter there is plain 
evidence that it need not have; for see ver. 15: ‘And 
thou, Capernaum, which art exalted to heaven, shalt be 
thrust down unto hell.’ For the right understanding 


* So Theophylact : μὴ θαυμάζετε εἰ δαίμονες ὑμῖν ὑποτάσσονται: ὁ yap ἄρχων 
αὐτῶν πάλαι κατέπεσεν ἀπ’ οὐρανοῦ" εἰ γὰρ δὲ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις οὐχ ἑωρᾶτο τοῦτο, 
ἀλλ᾽ οὖν ἐμοὶ ἐθεωρεῖτο τῷ τῶν ἀοράτων θεωρᾳφ. Ὥς ἀστραπὴ δὲ κατέπεσεν, ἐπεὶ 
φῶς ἦν, καὶ ἀρχάγγελος, καὶ ἑωσφόρος, εἰ καὶ σκότος γέγονε. 


THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 229 


either of that passage or of this we must dismiss the more 
solemn use of ‘ heaven,’ in which it signifies the holy place, 
the more immediate seat and habitation of God and of 
the blessed spirits, and only associate with the word the 
notion of elevation and preeminence—so that in fact 
Christ would be saying here, ‘I beheld Satan fall from 
the high places of his pride and power.’! 

What this fall of his might mean, and what the sub- 
jection of the devils to the Seventy had to do with it, 
may presently be considered; but it will be desirable 
first to confirm this interpretation of ‘heaven’ here by one 
or two further quotations. We have then in Isai. xiv., the 
description of the fall of the king of Babylon, typifying 
as he does a mightier enemy of the Church of God; and 
there the prophet exclaims, ‘ How art thou fallen from 
heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!’ (ver. 12); and if 
it be urged that ‘from heaven’ is a figure there, justified 
and explained by the comparison of the king to the 
morning star, it may be rejoined that thére is quite as 
much justification in the comparison of Satan here to the 
lightning. Then, too, at Ephes. vi. 12, the warfare of 
the faithful is declared at this present time to be with 
‘spiritual wickedness in high places,’ or, as it might be still 
more accurately translated, ‘in heavenly places’ (ἐν τοῖς 
ἐπουρανίοις), Which can only mean, as our Translators 
have rightly understood it, in high seats of authority. 
And then further, the passage in Rev. xii. 7-11, ‘ There 
was war im heaven, is referred by all good expositors 
to that destroying of the works of the devil which was 
the consequence of the triumphant life and death and 


* Compare Cicero (Phil. ii. 42): Collegam de celo detraxisti,—robbed him, 
that is, of the splendour and honour which before were his. 


230 THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 


ascension of the Son of God. There is described in its 
full consummation that which the Lord here with pro- 
phetic eye has already beheld. 

But if Christ be not here speaking of that original fall 
of Satan, in which he left his first habitation, but rather, 
as I am persuaded, of some fall within the fall, some pre- 
sent dejection of Satan from those seats of his power and 
his pride, which during the four thousand years of his 
domination he had reared and constructed anew, and 
from which he was now being thrust out again—what 
reason, it may be asked, had the Lord for in spirit be- 
holding this at the present moment? These few and 
petty exorcisms, were they not far too slight and insignifi- 
cant a matter to justify so magnificent a saying? As- 
suredly, if contemplated as the efficient cause of that fall; 
but not, if seen as its evidences and accompaniments. As 
Christ drew proofs of a victory over Satan, which must 
have been accomplished by Himself, from his own ex- 
pelling of devils (Matt. xii. 28, 29), so He found proofs 
of the same victory in like works done by his disciples. 
The power of the strong man could not but indeed be 
broken, when not merely the Stronger Himself could 
spoil his goods at his pleasure, but the very weaklings 
among his servants could go in and out of his domain, 
and do there at their will." The Lord in no way links 
the headlong and shameful fall of Satan from on high 
with what they had wrought, as if that had anything to 
do with effecting it. That fall, that new stripping him of 
so large a part of the power and strength which he still 


* Corn. a Lapide: Non novam mihi rem narratis, nam cum vos nuper 
mitterem ad evangelizandum videbam demonem sua potestate a me privatum 
quasi de clo cadere, ac per vos magis casurum. 


THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 231 


retained, was the fruit of the Incarnation, of the life and 
death and exaltation of the Son of man. 

But this new triumph of the kingdom of good over the 
kingdom of evil in their respective heads, which Christ 
evermore in the spirit saw, at certain moments of his life 
He realized with intenser vividness than at others. And 
this moment of the return of the Seventy was one of these 
solemn and festal moments of his life. He employs the 
imperfect tense (éeapodv), to make clear that He had 
foreseen the glorious issue even when He sent them forth. 
This which they now announce to Him is even as He 
had surely expected: ‘I saw, as I sent you forth, Satan 
fall like lightning from heaven.’ Already He beheld the 
whole idol-worship of the heathen world, whereof Satan 
was the soul and informing principle (1 Cor. x. 20), 
giving way, its splendour departing, its oracles dumb, 
its temples forsaken—till, instead of riding on the high 
places of the earth, and claiming the homage of the great 
and noble and learned of the world, it should creep into 
obscure corners, and after surviving awhile as the despised 
superstition of ‘pagans’ or villagers, expire altogether. 
This and much more of the same kind, the putting down 
of how many of the enormous wickednesses of the world, 
the casting down of how many strongholds of evil, was 
implied in the power which his disciples put forth. -See- 
ing the greatest in the least, He saw a pledge of the great 
exorcism of the heathen world in these slighter cures 
which his disciples had been strong to effect. 

He proceeds: ‘ Behold, I give you power to tread on 
serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the 
enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you. The 
reading, ‘ J have given you, arose from a misunderstanding 


232 THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 


of the passage. Hitherto He had not given them this 
power; they indeed, as we have seen, had in faith antici- 
pated some portion of it; and He, finding they were the 
men to make the right use of it, now imparts it to them 
in all its fulness, according to that law of his kingdom, 
‘To him that hath shall be given.’ In the form of the 
promise there is manifest allusion to Ps. xci. 13; perhaps 
also to Isai. xi. 8;' and, whether directly so intended or 
not, we may certainly recognize here a very gracious 
reading backward and reversing of a threatening made 
under the elder Covenant, ‘ Behold, I will send serpents, 
cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and 
they shall bite you, saith the Lord’ (Jer. vill. 17). The 
physical consequences of man’s sin, which may be traced 
through all regions of lower life, do in the animal world 
concentrate themselves with an especial malignity in the 
poisonous adder, in the stinging scorpion; which there- 
fore are fitly used as the symbols and representatives of 
all that has most power and most will to hurt and to 
harm; of all forms of deadliest malice exercised by Satan 
and his servants against the faithful (Ezek. ii. 6). Amid 
all this deadliest malice of the enemy they should go, 
themselves unharmed ; and, shod with the preparation of 
the Gospel of peace, should tread it all under their feet : 
‘and nothing shall by any means hurt you. And yet, 
while we thus transfer, and rightly, the serpent and 
scorpion into the region of spiritual wickedness, and 
see here a pledge and promise that the faithful should 
be kept from the powers of evil, we must not so 
exclusively do this as to leave out a literal fulfilment as 


1 Compare the παιόδίον νήπιον (LXX.) there with the νήπιοι of ver. 21. 


THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 233 


well; such as found place when St. Paul shook the viper . 
from his hand (Acts xxviii. 5), when St. John, if that 
indeed was so, drank of the poison-cup; and in this 
respect the passage contains the promise of the same 
character as that made by the Lord after his resurrection 
(Mark xvi. 18). 

But with the enlarged commission, for it is ‘all the 
power of the enemy’ which it is now given them to pre- 
vail against, comes also, and as I believe comes for the 
first time in this discourse, ‘the word of warning: ‘ Wot- 
withstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject 
unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written 
in heaven. They were not forbidden altogether to rejoice 
in these mighty powers as exercised by them, forbidden 
only to make them the chiefest matter of their joy. 
The reasoy is obvious. These a man might possess, and 
yet remain unsanctified still (Matt. vil. 22, 22; 1 Cor. 
xill. 2); these at best were only the privilege of a few, 
not therefore of the essence of a Christian’s joy. There 
was that in which they might rejoice with a joy which 
should not separate them from any, the least of their 
brethren, a joy which they had in common with all. 
There was that in which they might rejoice without 
fear, namely, in the eternal love of God, who had so 
loved as to ordain them unto everlasting life. This 


1 Augustine (Hnarr. in Ps. cxxx.): Redierunt apostoli, et dixerunt Domino, 
cum missi essent a Domino, Ecce, Domine, in nomine tuo etiam dsmonia 
nobis subjecta sunt. Vidit Dominus quod tentaret eossuperbia ex potentia 
miraculorum ; et ille, qui medicus venerat sanare tumores nostros, continuo 
ait, Nolite in hoc gaudere, quia dwmonia vobis subjecta sunt, sed gaudete 
quia nomina vestra scripta sunt in clo. Non omnes Christiani boni damonia 
ejiciunt; omnium tamen nomina scripta sunt in cwlo. Non eos voluit 
gaudere ex eo quod proprium habebant, sed ex eo quod cum ceteris salutem 
tenebant. Inde voluit gaudere apostolos, unde gaudes et tu. 


234 THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 


mention of ‘names written in heaven’ (cf. Isai. iv. 3; 
Heb. xii, 23, ‘the Church of the firstborn, which are 
written in heaven’) is the nearest allusion to ‘the book 
of life,’ ‘the Lamb’s book of life,’ the book of God,’ “ the 
book of the living,’ or simply ‘ the book, which anywhere 
occurs in the Gospels; but the image is one which else- 
where runs through all Scripture (Exod. xxxii. 32, 33; 
Ps. Ixix. 29; Dan: xii. 1; Phil.iv.35 Rev. τς το 
KX. 12; xxi. 27). It expresses under an image what 
St. Paul expresses without one, where he speaks of God’s 
eternal purposes of love toward his saints (Ephes.1. 4, 5). 


The Lord has admifiistered, where He saw this was 
needed, a wholesome rebuke to that pride, of which He 
detected the germs in his disciples; but this does not 
hinder Him from rejoicing in this new victory of the 
kingdom of light over the kingdom of darkness,—a matter 
of the greater joy, that it was these ‘ babes’ by whose 
hands this victory had been won: they of the household 
were dividing the spoil. ‘Jn that hour Jesus rejoiced’ in 
spirit, and said, I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven 
and earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise 


* The forms ἀγαλλιάω (for ἀγάλλω), and ἀγαλλίασις, belong to sacred Greek 
exclusively, being found only in the New Testament, the Septuagint, and 
in writings dependent upon these; ἀγαλλίαμα, which is also found in the 
Septuagint, does not occur in the New Testament. ᾿Αγαλλιᾶσθαι is often 
in the New Testament joined with χαίρειν, as at Matt. v. 12; Rev. xix. 7; 
cf. Tob. xiii. 13; in the Septuagint oftener with εὐφραίνεσθαι. It is stronger 
than χαίρειν, for this last may be in spirit and with no external manifesta- 
tions ; but ἀγαλλιᾶσθαι, is to exult, so to rejoice as with outward tokens to 
testify the inward joy, as an old expositor, Stella, here puts it well: Non 
est intelligendum quod antea in gaudio interiori non fuerit, sed interioris 
gaudii queedam signa nune exterius demonstravit ; ideo convenientissime 
dixit, Exultavit. Exultatio namque dicitur quasi extra se saltatio, quando 
videlicet ex abundantia gaudii interioris signa letitie foras erumpuut. 


THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. τῆς 


and prudent, and revealed them unto babes: even 80, 
Father ; for so it seemed good in thy sight. Precisely the 
same words with a slightly different introduction occur 
at Matt. xi. 25,26; where they cannot possibly be the 
record of the same discourse;-for they have the same 
perfect fitness there as here; they are embedded in one 
narrative quite as deeply as in the other. A careful 
comparison of the two passages can, I think, leave no 
doubt on our minds that Christ did from time to time 
repeat Himself in nearly or quite the same words ; which, 
after all, is not at all so wonderful in Him, each of whose 
utterances being perfect, could never be changed for the 
better. . 

The all-important character of that which He is utter- 
ing here may well explain its repetition; setting, as He 
does, his seal to that word of the prophet, ‘Woe unto 
them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in 
their own sight’ (Isai. v. 21; cf. Prov. iii. 5, 7), and, be 
it observed, not merely thanking God for what He has 
revealed, but for what He has hidden, that the same 
things, revealed by Him to some, were by Him hidden 
from others. There is then, if these words mean aught, 
such a thing as a punitive hiding and a penal blindness. 
The hand of the Lord may be upon those who withstand 
the truth, so that they shall not be able to see the sun of 
righteousness (Acts xiii. 11). That there are those from 
whom God hides his truth in displeasure may be a very 
terrible fact ; but a fact may be very terrible, and yet true 
notwithstanding ; and here is one of which we can only 
get rid by dealings the most violent with this and with 
other plainest statements of Scripture (Isai. vi. 10; Matt. 
ΧΙ, 11-15; Luke xix. 42; John ix. 39). Christ here 


236 THE RETURN OF THE SEVENTY. 


thanks his Father for two things, first, that He has hidden 
from the wise and prudent; and, secondly, that what He 
has hidden from them He has revealed to babes; the 
hiding and revealing being recognized by Him as alike 
his Father’s work, and the judgment and the grace-alike 
matters for which He renders, thanks. The words of 
St. Paul, 1 Cor. 1. 26-29, supply a remarkable parallel to 
this whole saying; while the early history of the Church, 
‘from which Scribes and Pharisees, the Gamaliels, and all 
or nearly all of the disputers of this world, stood aloof, 
fishermen meanwhile and publicans, and men ignorant 
and unlearned, finding their place therein, furnishes the 
best commentary. 


11. THE PHARISEES SEEKING TO SCARE 
THE LORD FROM GALILEE. 


Luke xiii. 31-33. 


Tue Lord lingers too long in Galilee; so, at least, to his 
adversaries it seems. He is there comparatively secure 
among his friends and adherents; every day adding to 
the number of these; confirming his word by signs fol- 
lowing (Matt. xv. 28; John iv. 46); his reputation grow- 
ing; all men holding Him for a prophet (Matt. vin. 27 ; 
ix. 8, 33); so that He will hardly be reached by 
the extremest malice of his foes. Gladly would these 
scare Him from the shelter of that safe retreat into the 
toils which have been set for Himeat Jerusalem (Mark 
xi. 18; Matt. xxi. 46). And even if they do not quite 
succeed in this, it will be something if they can deliver 
themselves from’ his unwelcome presence in Galilee, at 
the same time involving Him in the discredit of an ignoble 
flight. It was that if possible, this at any rate, which they 
proposed to themselves, when they made to Him the 
communication which follows. 

‘The same day there came certain of the Pharisees’— 
came, no doubt with a friendly and confidential mien, 
and as men to whom, whatever secondary differences 
might exist between them, his safety was dear,—‘ saying 
unto Him, Get Thee out, and depart hence, for Herod will 


238 THE PHARISEES SEEKING TO SCARE 


kill Thee’ The words curiously remind us of another 
similar plot and intrigue, by which it was sought, and 
equally in vain, to terrify a prophet of the Old Covenant 
from the appointed sphere of his labours; Jeroboam 
playing there the part of Herod here ; Amaziah, the priest 
of Bethel, of the Pharisees ; and the prophet Amos sustain- 
ing there the part which our Lord sustains here. There 
too Amaziah, with apparently no unfriendly meaning, 
although he had just before denounced the overbold 
prophet to the king (had the Pharisees done the same in 
the present instance 3), came to Amos, saying, ‘O thou 
seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there 
eat bread, and prophesy there; but prophesy not again 
any more at Bethel, for it is the king’s chapel, and it is 
the king’s court (Amos vil. 10-17; ef. Isai. xxx. 10, 11). 
As the Pharisees here, so the priest of the Calves there 
takes nothing by his move, but goes utterly baffled and 
defeated away. 

We may affirm, with tolerable certainty, that Herod 
Antipas entertained no such design of killing Jesus as by 
these Pharisees is ascribed to him here. He had enough 
of prophet’s blood on his hands in the murder of John 
the Baptist, and can scarcely have wished to have more. 
A weak, frivolous, unworthy prince, yet he is nowhere 
charged in Scripture with seeking to compass the Lord’s 
death. Even the crime of the Baptist’s death, who came 
into far more direct collision with him, he had been 
entangled in unawares. When he heard of the fame of 
the Lord, he satisfied himself with saying to his servants, 
‘This is John the Baptist; he is risen from the dead, 
and therefore mighty works do show forth themselves in 
him’ (Matt. xiv. 2); he devises no plots of open or secret 


THE LORD FROM GALILEE, 239 


violence against Him. The report of Christ’s miracles 
appears to have excited his curiosity (for his doctrine he 
cared nothing), so that when Pilate sent Jesus to him, ‘he 
was exceeding glad, for he was desirous to see Him of a 
long season, and he hoped to have seen some miracle 
done by Him’ (Luke xxiii. 8); but it is plain, both 
from ‘this account and from his conduct in sending the 
Lord back unharmed to Pilate, with nothing worthy of 
death done to Him (Luke xxiii. 15), that he had no 
enmity against Him for the past, nor fear of Him for the 
future. We may say, further, that had he cherished that 
murderous thought in his heart which the Pharisees 
impute to him, ‘that fox’ is not the style with which he 
would have been characterized by the lips of ‘truth ; but 
if the Lord had been pleased to designate him with any 
title of the kind, He would have styled him ‘that wolf, 
or ‘that leopard,’ by the name of some animal, of which 
bloodthirstiness, and not cunning, is the prevailing feature. 
Add to all this, that if Herod had been known really 
to entertain such designs, the Pharisees, who were now in 
deadliest conflict with the Lord, would have been the last 
to warn Him of his danger, or in any way to assist Him in 
escaping from the snares which were being laid for his life. 

The only point upon which it is possible to raise a 
question seems to me to be this, namely, whether this was 
a gratuitous invention on the part of the Pharisees, sug- 
gested possibly by some flying rumours, to which, how- 
ever, they gave no credit themselves, of Herod’s ill-will 
to Christ—such rumours as the Baptist’s murder might 
easily have occasioned; whether the tale they bring was 
thus a mere invention of their own, devised with the 
purpose of terrifying the Lord from those quarters; or 


240 THE PHARISEES SEEKING TO SCARE 


whether they and Herod understood one another, and 
he, possibly disquieted at this period by the growing 
number of Christ's adherents, may have been willing to 
use their assistance, and to allow them to use the terror 
of his name, so to induce the Lord quietly to withdraw 
to some other part of the land. 

Those who are disposed to see an understanding here 
between Herod and the Pharisees, urge that in the words 
of Christ’s reply, ‘Go ye, and tell that fox, there is an 
intimation that such a collusion existed, and that it had 
not escaped Him. They professed to be his friends, and 
to bring Him this warning out of goodwill, and meaning 
to defeat the purpose of Herod; but sending them to 
him with that message, the Lord will imply that He 
perfectly apprehends the relation in which they and 
Herod stand to one another—how that Herod was wait- 
ing to learn from their lips the success of their stratagem, 
and the spirit in which He Himself had received that 
announcement which they brought: ‘This is my answer 
to him that sent you, whose emissaries you have con- 
descended to become—to that fox, who thinks with his 
paltry wiles and transparent devices to scare the lion 
from his own domain.’ , 

Yet I cannot but believe that their view is a truer one, 
the many interpreters, ancient and modern, who have 
seen in this report which the Pharisees bring to Jesus a 
pure invention of their own, a fiction wholly of their own 
devising. They did but pretend the malice of Herod, 
who, if he had desired to rid himself of the Lord’s pre- 
sence, had other means at his command ; and who certainly 
was on no such friendly terms with the Pharisees as to 
make very probable any understanding between them. 


Ui 


THE LORD FROM GALILEE. 241 


Nor need the words, ‘Go ye, and tell that fox, cause any 
difficulty here. The Lord, in that spirit of finest irony 
which is not alien from the spirit of deepest love and 
loftiest truth, so far fell in with, or seemed to fall in with, 
the aspect of the matter which they presented to Him, 
and to be deceived by it, that He used its language—not 
at the same time failing to let them perceive that their 
wretched covert intrigues were open and manifest to Him. 
The ‘fox’ was really in their own hearts, and to this 
‘fox’ He indeed addresses Himself.’ Some of the early 
interpreters ingeniously urge in this sense the words 
‘this fox, as one actually present, rather than ‘that 702, 
one ata distance,” which might have beforehand been 
expected. If there be anything in this, our Version has 
not preserved it, and the Vulgate as little. It was they, 
the Pharisees, who were themselves offended at his con- 
tinued presence in the land ; it was to their own selves they 
should indeed carry the message back. This explanation 
has the further advantage, that so the decorum which 
our Lord ever preserved in regard of the powers that be, 
however unworthy were those who might actually represent 
them at the time, will be perfectly maintained ; which 
decorum might seem violated, if the message were really 
intended for Herod, and not rather to stop short with 
these intriguing Pharisees themselves. 

But the reply which they were to carry back to ‘that 
fox, in other words, to accept themselves, is not without 


* Maldonatus: Christus non Herodem, sed Pharisxos ipsos qui Herodem 
sibi minabantur, vulpem appellavit. Non quod hxc verba de Herode non 
dixerit, sed quod in personié Herodis, quam illi sibi induebant ut ipsum 
deterrerent, eos notaverit atque refellerit. 

* Thus Theophylact: οὐ yap εἶπε, τῇ ἀλώπεκι ἐκείνῃ, ἀλλὰ ταύτῃ. 

* We have ‘ that fox ;’ the Vulgate, ‘ vulpi ili.’ 


R 


242 THE PHARISEES SEEKING TO SCARE 


a certain amount of obscurity: ‘ Behold, I cast out devils, 
and I do cures to-day and to-morrow,’ and the third day 
T shall be perfected. The general meaning of the answer 
is not hard to catch: ‘So far from being interrupted in 
my ministry by any tidings of the kind you bring, be they 
false or true, by your wish, or by Herod’s wish, to be rid 
of my presence at once, I shall proceed on my way, I 
shall do as before I have done, I shall put forth my 
beneficent powers, casting out devils, healing the sick for 
the present (‘to-day’), for the future (‘to-morrow’), and 
only at a remoter period (‘the third day’) will my life 
and course reach their appointed term.” The words 
are exactly parallel to others spoken on not a very dis- 
similar occasion, when his timid disciples would have 
dissuaded Him from affronting the dangers of Judea ; 
to whom He replied : ‘Are there not twelve hours in the 
day? If any man walk in the day he stumbleth not, 
because he seeth the light of this world’ (John xi. 9; 
ef. ix. 4). ‘To-day and to-morrow and the third day’ 
will here exactly correspond to the ‘twelve hours’ there, 
signifying as they do a certain fixed appointed time. Not 
of necessity a very brief time, but rather the contrary ; 
for an intention upon his part to make his further sojourn 
in Galilee a brief one was exactly that which the Pharisees 
would have been best pleased to hear, while it was very 


1 Σήμερον καὶ αὔριον : ef. Josh. xx. 18,28; and for a similar method of 
counting backward to the third day, Susan. 15. Ν 

* Cajetan: Per hodie et cras et tertiam diem universi temporis requisiti 
ad opus suum perfectio significatur. Calvin: Hodie et cras defungar munere 
mihi divinitus injuncto ; ubiad finem stadii ventum fuerit, tune in sacrificium 
offerar. There is frequently a certain solemnity about this indication of the 
third day ; such as is scarcely wanting here ; thus see Gen. xxii. 4; XXXi. 22; 
XxXiv. 25; XL 26: xii. 18; Exod xix. rz, τό: αὶ Kin: xii. 1332 ΚΊΗ ἘΠῚ δὴ 


THE LORD FROM GALILEE. 243 


far from his purpose at all to gratify them by the announce- 
ment which He made.' Least of all do these words signify 
—which would be a meaning utterly trivial—that the 
time of his actual tarrying in Galilee should extend over 
two literal days, and that on the third He should quit it, 
even as the verse following can as little mean that He 
would occupy three such actual days in the journey from 
that spot to Jerusalem. What He says is this: ‘ There is 
for Me a predetermined time, during which I shall labour 
unhindered. No malice nor intrigues of my enemies 
shall prevail to abridge that time.? Instead of fleeing, as 
you suggest, I will leisurely accomplish my work this 
day and to-morrow ; and then when the third day comes 
I shall be perfected, 1 shall finish my course: the things 
concerning Me will have an end; which, however’ (for all 
this‘is implied in the word), ‘shall be no abrupt nor pre- 
mature one, cutting off my life in the midst of my days, 
with my work unfinished, in an obscure corner of a re- 
mote province; but a death which shall be the solemn and 
fit conclusion of my life, the completion and consummation 
of all which I came into the world to accomplish.’ 


* Maldonatus: Non id agebat Christus, ut Pharissos consolaretur; quod 
profecto fecisset, si illis significésset brevi se post tempore moriturum. Quid 
enim erat quod illi magis optarent? sed volebat potius augere materiam 
invidie atque doloris. 

* Stella: Fallimini, si creditis vos aut Herodes quod versutia humana 
possit aliquid contra potentiam Dei et ejus voluntatem. Vos dicitis quod 
Herodes mortem mihi molitur, et vos non moleste fertis; sed inanis est 
deliberatio ejus, quia non est in manu ejus mors mea, quia nemo tollet 
animam meam ame. Potestatem enim habeo ponendi animam meam, et sic 
cum voluero ponam eam et moriar. 

® To make τελειοῦμαι a middle verb, completing it with τὰ ἔργα, and find- 
ing as the meaning, ‘ on the third day I finish,’ i.e. ‘ my works,’ sadly mars the 
force of this passage. It is not for nothing that the two active verbs which 
go before are exchanged for this passive. Our English, ‘Z shall be per- 
Jected,’ is very good; a vast improvement on ‘J make an end,’ of the earlier 

R2 


244 THE PHARISEES SEEKING TO SCARE 


There may seem a slight contradiction between the 
statement of the verse which has just been considered, 
and of that which now follows: ‘ WVevertheless," I must 
walk to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following ;’ for 
here the Lord speaks of ‘the third day’ as one of the 
days of his walking, while there He contemplated it as 
the day on which He should be perfected and finish his 
course. But there is no real contradiction. He contem- 
plates his death as being, in fact, the crowning work of 
his life. As little does this verse 33 contain a mere 
repetition of the statement of that which went before. 
Hitherto He has but stated the fact that his ministry 
should continue; now He is giving the grounds in the 
divine order and fitness of things why it should continue, 
why He should walk and work unlet and unhindered. 
‘This my death here in this remote Galilee, with which 
you threaten Me, is impossible; for a can not be that a 
prophet, and therefore least of all He who is the chief of 
the prophets, perish out of Jerusalem. That city which 


Versions, as is also the Vulgate, Consummor. Compare, for similar uses 
of τελειοῦσθαι, Phil. 111. 12; Acts xx. 24; Heb. v. 9; xii. 23. More than 
once Augustine transfers this word from Christ to Christ’s Church, and 
finds in it a prophecy of the three stages of the spiritual life through 
which He causes it in each of its members to pass, namely, the forgiveness 
of sins, the restoration to health, the consummation in glory; thus Con. 
Jul. Pelag. vi. 19: Ecce, inquit, ejicio deemonia, et sanitates perficio hodie et 
cras, et tertid die consummor. Expulsio quippe est demoniorum remissio 
peccatorum ; perfectio sanitatum, que fit proficiendo post baptismum ; tertia 
consummatio est, quam sus quoque carnis immortalitate monstravit, in- 
corruptibilium beatitudo gaudiorum. Cf. Enarr. in Ps. ex. 46. - 

* What the exact force of this ‘ Nevertheless’ (πλήν) is, expositors have 
often not troubled themselves to consider; it seems to me best given by 
Maldonatus, whese commentary on the whole of this difficult passage is 
masterly: Refertur non ad omnia precedentia, sed ad illud tantum ultimum, 
et tertid die consummor, quasi dicat quamvis tertid die moriturus sim, 
tamen interim nemo me impedire poterit, quominus hoc intermedio tempore 
miracula faciam. 


THE LORD FROM GALILEE. 245 


has been the murderess of all the prophets from the 
beginning (Isai. i. 21), which has ever claimed this dread- 
ful prerogative to herself, as she is chief in favours, to be 
also chief in guilt, she shall not forego it now; she shall 
continue to the end the seat of all the deadliest enmity 
to the kingdom of God.’ But the words reach much 
further than this, much further than to the stating merely 
of such a general fact as this. They have a direct refer- 
ence to those with whom the Lord is speaking now, and 
contain the finest irony on their affected interest in his 
welfare. ‘You have come, expressing your alarm for 
my safety, should I tarry longer here. You may lay aside 
your apprehensions. My danger is not in Galilee, nor 
yet from Herod. I shall not perish here, but in Jeru- 
salem, your seat, your head-quarters, where you reign 
supreme. When the day of my death, or of my con- 
summation, arrives, you, and not Herod, will be the 
authors of the murderous deed.’* 


1 Calvin: Vosne ut ab Herode mihi caveam monetis, quos video meos 
fore carnifices ¢ 


246 THE UNFINISHED TOWER 


12. THE UNFINISHED TOWER AND THE 
DEPRECATED WAR. 


Luke xiv. 25-33. 


Our Lord on more than one occasion during his earthly 
ministry found a multitude in his train; loosely attached 
to Him; but who at the same time would inevitably have 
detached themselves from Him and fallen away, so soon 
as ever a day of temptation had arrived. Nothing could 
be further from his desire than such a following as this. 
‘They that are with Him are called and faithful and 
true’ (Rev. xvii. 14); and such will abide with Him 
unto the end. But not so these; to whom therefore He 
turned, and spake words repelling rather than inviting. 
They who in this world would enlist recruits keep out of 
sight what is hard, painful, and dangerous in the work to 
which they invite them; but not so He, who desired that 
none should join themselves to Him without a clear 
knowledge beforehand of all to which they were engaging 
themselves. ΤῸ a Paul, on the very threshold of his con- 
version, He will shew what great things he must suffer 
for his name’s sake (Acts ix. 16). Ezekiel at his first 
commission is told plainly to what manner of men, such ᾿ 
as could be likened only to thorns, briars, scorpions, he 
is sent (Ezek. 11. 6). And to this multitude Christ ad- 
dressed one of his hard sayings—one after the hearing of 
which we can hardly doubt that many went back and 


AND THE DEPRECATED WAR. 247 


walked no more with Him (cf. John vi. 66). A sad con- 
summation, yet better far than that they should throw in 
their lot with Him, afterwards to be offended, and to fall 
from Him, in that day of trial which was sure before long 
to arrive (Matt. xiii. 21). 

We read then that ‘there went great multitudes with 
Him ; and he turned, and said unto them, If any man 
come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, 
and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own 
life also, he cannot be my disciple. Let us here notice, 
by the way, the profound confidence in a guiding, inter- 
preting Spirit who should be ever at work in his Church, 
which these words of Christ reveal. Take them literally, 
and they stand in direct contradiction to the whole 
teaching of the rest of Scripture, in contradiction to the 
teaching of Moses, of the prophets, of the apostles, of 
Christ Himself; they enjoin an immorality; require of 
men to hate those whom it is their prime duty to love. 
And yet Christ spake the words notwithstanding, satisfied 
to leave to that interpreting Spirit to put them in harmony 
with all which elsewhere is commanded in the Scripture, 
or written by the finger of God on the heart of man. 

But in other ways also the unparalleled boldness of 
Christ’s teaching, the tremendous claims which He makes 
on those who offer to join themselves to Him, may well 
fill us with marvel and with awe. How intolerable the 
pride and presumption of any less than the greatest, 
lower than the highest, to impose the conditions of 
discipleship which He here imposes, to demand of men 
the sacrifices which He here demands; and this, be it 
observed, not in the name of One whose messenger He is ; 
but in his own; standing forth as Himself the object, to 


248 THE UNFINISHED TOWER 


whom all this measureless devotion of all men is justly 
due, who, claiming it all, claims nothing but his own. 
When I ask myself what are the proofs of Christ's 
divinity which the Scripture affords, when I enquire 
whether He did Himself there claim to be God, I find 
evidence of this not so much in a certain number of 
texts where this in as many words is asserted—though 
these are most needful—but far more in the position 
toward every other man which He uniformly, and as a 
matter of course, assumes. What man, that was not 
man’s Maker as well as his fellow, could have required that 
father and mother, wife and children, should all be post- 
poned to him; that, where any competition between his 
claims and theirs arose, He should be everything and 
they nothing ? that not merely these, which, though very 
close to a man are yet external to him, but that his very 
self, his own life, should be hated, when on no other 
conditions Christ could be loved. It is nothing strange 
or unreasonable that man’s Creator, the author of his 
being, the supreme and absolute Good, should demand all 
this of his creatures (Exod. xxxii.27; Deut. xxxiii. 9); 
but that Jesus of Nazareth should challenge the same 
unreserved devotedness on the part of all men, should 
require that every other duty of every other man should 
yield to the duty to Him, that every other love should 
subordinate itself to the love of Him; how could this be, 
except as He also stood in the place of God, and was 
God? 

But these are thoughts which, followed out as they 
deserve, would lead us too far from the subject imme- 
diately in hand. Christ has spoken of the absolute re- 
nunciation of all, even of a man’s own life, that last 


AND THE DEPRECATED WAR. 249 


citadel of selfishness, as he who ought best to know, 
had long since proclaimed (Job 11. 4), that citadel, where 
it may still make itself strong when every outwork has 
been abandoned '—He has spoken of this as the condition 
without which no man could be his disciple. But this 
self which needs to be renounced is oftentimes a very 
subtle one, the self of him who proposes to serve God, 
but to serve Him in his own strength, and not in God’s ; 
who may have renounced much, but has not renounced 
a vain confidence in his own powers, and that these will 
enable him to carry to a successful end a service thus 
undertaken. Christ uses two similitudes, borrowed from 
two enterprizes, the one grave to a private man, the other 
even to a king; by aid of the first He warns us of the 
shameful close which may attend a service in this spirit 
begun; while in the second He points out to all the only 
wise course for the avoiding of such perils as would thus 
lie before them. This is the first: ‘ For which of you, 
intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and 
counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish wt ? 
Lest haply, after he hath lad the foundation, and is not 
able to finsh wt, all that behold it begin to mock him, 
saying, This man began to build, and was not able to 
jinish. And this the second: ‘Or what king, going to 
make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and 
consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet 
him that cometh against him with twenty thousand? Or 
else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an 
ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace. ” 


‘ As Gregory the Great here says well (Hom. xxxii.): Nec tamen sufficit 
nostra relinquere, nisi relinquamus et nos. 

2 "Ev δέκα χιλιάσιν. See for the same idiom, indeed for exactly the same 
words, 1 Macc. iv. 29; and with the συμβαλεῖν εἰς πόλεμον compare συμ- 
βαλεῖν εἰς μαχῆν, Josephus, Antt. vi. 5. 2. 


250 THE UNFINISHED TOWER 


- The comparison of the Christian life, sometimes that of 
the individual, sometimes that of the collective Church, 
to the carrying up of a building is frequent in Scripture 
(Matt. vii. 24-27; Ephes. ii. 20-22; 1 Cor. iii. g; 1 Pet. 
ii. 4, 5); and not less frequent the likening of it to the 
waging of a war (1 Cor. xvi. 13; 1 Thess. v. 8; Ephes. 
vi. 11-17; 2 Tim. ii. 3,4; iv. 7). But the fitting in of 
these words to their place here, the making them to 
illustrate the matter directly in hand, is not so easy as is 
often carelessly taken for granted. Indeed the current 
interpretation of this passage is far from satisfactory ; and 
we have only to look a little closely at it to perceive the 
very serious difficulties with which it is encumbered. 
I believe, indeed, that by that interpretation words among 
the most profound and far reaching which our Lord 
spake upon earth, are made to take comparatively a 
slight and trivial meaning. That interpretation may be 
stated as follows. Christ would have the candidates for 
admission within the circle of his disciples to consider 
diligently with themselves, and accurately to weigh, 
whether they have strength and means to carry them 
triumphantly through the arduous enterprize which, they 
meditate; and if, as the result of this calculation, they 
discover that they have not, then to renounce the enter- 
prize altogether; and not, as some foolish builder, to 
begin the tower of the ‘Christian life, which they will 
prove unable to carry to the end; like some rash king to 
challenge to the conflict powers, the powers, that is, of 
the kingdom of darkness, which are twice as strong as 
they are, with which therefore they cannot hope to wage 
a successful war. 


AND THE DEPRECATED WAR. 251 


This explanation labours under a double defect. In 
the first place, according to all the other teaching of 
Scripture, the disciple who indeed builds and completes 
the tower, is not one who has counted the cost, and found 
that he has sufficient; he whose warfare is crowned 
with victory is not he who has calculated the opposing 
forces, and found that those at his command are more 
and mightier than any which can be brought against him ; 
but he rather who, having counted the cost, has found 
that he has not enough, that the outlay far exceeds any 
resources at his command, that he begins and must 
continue a bankrupt to the end; having nothing in 
himself, that so he may possess all things in God; who, 
having taken the measure of his own forces and of 
those of the adversary, has understood that this war- 
fare is one not to be waged at his own charges, has 
learned to cry, ‘ Who is sufficient for these things?’ and 
sought to a mightier for aid. All other Scripture teaches 
us, in the glorious words of Charles Wesley’s hymn, to be 
‘strong in self-despair, and not in self-confidence ; that 
emptiness is indeed the one condition of fulness; that, 
however sad a thing it may be in this world to end with 
being a bankrupt, in the spiritual world it is the best 
thing which can happen to begin with being such; a 
man’s poverty being there his riches, and his weakness 
his strength; for such are the strange paradoxes of the 
kingdom of heaven. 

This is-one blemish—a most serious one; but there is 
another behind. Granting that this objection could be 
set aside, is it conceivable that Christ should counsel in 
such a ¢ase, and having made such a discovery, not so 


252 THE UNFINISHED TOWER 


much as to begin the too costly tower ;* or, more mar- 
vellous still, not so much as to provoke the too potent foe, 
but on the contrary, to make terms with him, to engage 
not to molest Aim, if he will not molest us, whom to 
defy to the uttermost is our first duty and only safety 
(1 Pet. v. 9; Ephes. vi. 11-16), whose works to destroy 
was once the work of Christ in his own person, will be 
his work through his Church to the end? What sort of 
peace would that be? Can we imagine that the Lord 
would give the allowance of his word to such abject 
resolves as these? for what, after all, are they who leave 
off to build, who, in place of challenging, make conditions 
with the enemy, but the Demases who forsake not Paul 
only, but Paul's Lord, having loved the present world; 
who, when tribulation comes or even threatens, straight- 
way are offended and fall away; who see the wolf 
coming and flee? ‘The fearful’ of Rev. xxi. 8, the tradi- 
tores, the thurificati, of early Church history, all these 
did in that sense count the cost, and gave over to build; 
having challenged the king of the dark kingdom, shrunk 
from meeting him in battle. But can we suppose that 
Christ had a word of allowance for these? that they could 
plead that they were acting on his advice? and yet, adopt- 
ing the common interpretation, how could we avoid so 
doing ? 

But it is not so. These sayings of our Lord contain a 
far other lesson than this, one in far closer harmony with 
the other teaching of Scripture. What that teaching is, 
the words with which Christ follows up and applies 
all which He has here said, sufficiently declare: ‘ So like- 


"As Maldonatus asks well, who sees the difficulty, but not the way out 
of it, Deinde quomodo nos Christus dehortaretur ne Christiani efficeremur ὃ 


AND THE DEPRECATED WAR. 253 


wise, whosotver he be of you that forsaketh not all that he 
hath, he cannot be my disciple’ In that ‘forsaketh’ 
(ἀποτάσσεται), or ‘renounces,’ ‘bids good by to,’ ‘ takes 
farewell of,’ lies the key to the whole passage. Christ sees 
the multitudes addressing themselves to his discipleship 
with one kind of furniture and apparatus for it; such as 
He knows will utterly fail them, when the stress of the 
trial comes; He warns them of their need of quite an- 
other. It is the poor, those who, counting up their 
means, discover that they have πού enough to carry 
through the work, and that of their own they never will 
have enough, and who therefore renounce all that they 
have, it is these, and not the rich, not, that is, they who 
walk in a vain conceit of their own riches (Rev. iii. 17), 
who are able to finish this tower.’ How it fares with 
the others, what a swift and shameful coming to the end 
of all their fancied resources inevitably awaits them, this 
Christ puts vividly before our eyes in the words which 
follow (ver. 29, 30). He gathers up in these the world’s 
judgment upon them who, professing to forsake it, were 
yet of it all the while, and who sooner or later reveal 
that they were so. The world cannot pardon that they 
should ever have affected any higher service than its 
own; and even while it receives back its prodigals, 
receives them with taunt and with scorn; the salt which 
has lost its savour is trodden under foot, not of God, 
but, doom more ignominious far, is trodden under foot 
of men (Matt. v.13). Nor are worldly and wicked men 
the only mockers. The scorners here include, as more 


‘Gregory the Great (Hom. 37): Hoc enim inter terrenum et celeste 
edificium distat, quod terrenum edificium expensas colligendo construitur, 
cxleste vero edificium expensas dispergendo. Ad illud sumtus facimus, 
si non habita colligamus; ad istud sumtus facimus, si et habita relinquamus. 


254 THE UNFINISHED TOWER 


than one in olden time has urged, not these men only, 
well pleased when any scheme of higher service, which 
threatened to put them and their lives to rebuke, has 
come to nought; but fallen spirits as well, the angels 
to whom men are a spectacle (1 Cor. iv. 8); who, so 
far as they can rejoice in aught, rejoice in dishonour 
done to God; and who, being first our tempters, are 
afterwards, when we have yielded to their temptations, 
our mockers and scorners as well:' ‘ This man’ (the con- 
tempt makes itself still more felt in the original), ‘ began 
to build, and was not able to finish.’ 

Such uncompleted buildings, open to all the winds and 
rains of heaven, with their naked walls, and with all 
which has been spent upon them utterly wasted, are 
called in the language of the world, which has often so 
true a word, This man’s, or that man’s, Folly; arguing 
as they do so utter a lack of wisdom and prevision on 
their parts who, began them. Such, for example, is 
Charles the Fifth’s palace at Granada, the Kattenburg at 
Cassel. They that would be Christ’s disciples shall see 
to it that they present no such Babels to the ready scorn 
of the scornful; beginning, as though they intended to 
take heaven by storm, to build up a tower which should 
reach even thither, and anon coming to an end of all their 
resources, of all their zeal, all their patience, and leaving 
nothing but an utterly baffled purpose, the mocking-stock 
of the world, even as those builders of old left nothing but 
a shapeless heap of bricks to tell of the entire miscal- 
culation which they had made. Making mention of ‘a 
tower, I cannot but think that the Lord intended an 


‘ Gregory the Great (Hom. 37): Ipsos irrisores patimur quos ad malum 
persuasores habemus. 


AND THE DEPRECATED WAR. 255 


allusion to that great historic tower, the mightiest failure 
and defeat which the world has seen, that tower of Babel, 
which, despite of its vainglorious and vaunting beginning, 
ended in the shame and confusion of all who undertook 


it (Gen. xi. 1-9).’ 


It is well worthy of remark, and indeed I have briefly 
remarked already (p. 177), how greatly our Lord loves 
to bring out some truth which He would very earnestly 
enforce and commend to men, by two successive images ; 
like, and yet unlike ; approaching it from different quarters ; 
the second oftentimes going deeper into the heart of the 
matter than did the first, at all events presenting it in 
some aspect under which the first did not, perhaps in the 
nature of things could not, present it; the two in this 
manner mutually completing one another. It is thus for 
example with the parables of the mustard-seed and the 


1A characteristic passage in Jeremy Taylor’s Sermons, Of Lukewarm- 
ness and Zeal, contains no direct reference to these words of our Lord, yet 
such can scarcely have not been intended: ‘So have I seen a fair struc- 
ture begun with art and care, and raised to half its stature ; and then it stood 
still by the misfortune or negligence of the owner, and the rain descended, 
and dwelt in its joints, and supplanted the contexture of its pillars; and 
having stood awhile like the antiquated temple of a deceased oracle, it fell 
into a hasty age, and sunk upon its own knees, and so descended into ruin: 
so is the imperfect, unfinished spirit of a man; it lays the foudation of a 
holy resolution, and strengthens it with vows and arts of prosecution, it 
raises up the walls, sacraments and prayers, reading and holy ordinances ; 
and holy actions begin with a slow motion, and the building stays, and the 
spirit is weary, and the soul is naked, and exposed to temptation, and in the 
days of storm take in every thing that can do it mischief; and it is faint 
and sick, listless and tired, and it stands till its own weight wearies the 
foundation, and then declines to death and sad disorder, being so much the 
worse because it hath not only returned to its first follies, but hath super- 
added unthankfulness and carelessness, a positive neglect, and a despite of 
holy things, a setting a low price to the things of God, laziness and wretched- 
ness: all which are evils superadded to the first state of coldness, whither 
he is with all these loads and circumstances of death easily revolved.’ 


256 : THE UNFINISHED TOWER 


leaven (Matt. xiii. 31-33); the former setting forth the 
outward development, the second the inward operation, 
of the truth; it is thus again with the Hid Treasure and 
the Pearl (Matt. xiii. 44-46), the first putting before us one 
who has found, the second one who has sought as well as 
found, the kingdom of heaven. So too, as we have 
seen, the new wine in the old vessels is something more, 
and contains a profounder lesson, than the new patch 
upon the old garment (Matt. ix. 16,17). Another ex- 
ample we have here, where the king, measuring before- 
hand his own forces and the forces of the adversary whom 
he is tempted to challenge to the conflict, tells us some- 
thing which the builder, sitting down to count the cost of 
the tower which he is planning to erect, would not have 
told. There is sometimes a further gain in a duplicate 
illustration such as this; and such gain is here. Any 
misgiving as to the correctness of the interpretation which 
has been here put upon the first similitude must, I am 
persuaded, disappear, with a careful study of the second. 

That in the sphere of things natural the course which 
Christ here recommends is the only wise one, this is self- 
evident. Any other would be fraught with uttermost 
hazard, with almost inevitable ruin, to him who pursued 
it. War indeed is sweet, as the ancient proverb assures 
us, to those who have never tried it;' and examples out 
of number of kings who, committing themselves to an 
unequal struggle, have drawn down ruin on themselves 
and on their kingdom, history sacred and profane will 
alike supply. Croesus in profane history, Amaziah (2 Kin. 
xiv. 8-12) and Josiah (2 Kin. xxiii. 29, 30) in sacred, 
will suggest themselves at once. Hezekiah, on the con- 


? Τλυκὺς ἀπείρῳ πόλεμος. 


AND THE DEPRECATED WAR. 257 


trary, wise betimes, and knowing how much _ over- 
matched he would prove in conflict with the great king 
of Assyria, sends an ambassage, while the other is yet at 
a distance, desiring conditions of peace : ‘I have offended ; 
return from me; that which thou puttest on me will I 
bear’ (2 Kin. xviii. 14). 

But it is with the spiritual counterpart of this wisdom 
that we have here to do. The exposition which I have 
felt bound to reject, that, I mean, which makes the king 
who might come with his twenty thousand against him 
who with ten thousand should imprudently provoke a 
war, to be the devil, altogether paralyses ver. 32; for 
what can be the meaning of sending an ambassage to 
him, and desiring of him conditions of peace? How can 
we conceive, as has been urged already, counsel such as 
this issuing from the lips of the Lord? Lange, who 
clings to the common interpretation, can only evade the 
difficulty which it offers in this way: ‘ peace here accord- 
ing to the sense of the image can only mean a truce, and 
the request for peace only the avoiding of a premature 
conflict, to which the Christian as yet is unequal.’ It is 
a still poorer escape to urge, as does Calvin, that all parts 
of such a parabolic saying as this must not be pressed, 
that some in the interpretation may be very well allowed 
to fall away. This in itself is most true; yet what 
part could be pressed, if this, in which the whole teach- 
ing evidently culminates, might not be so?’ But how 


* Gerhard (Harm. Hoang. 120) in like manner owns that not merely we 
must not press this part of the similitude, but in the application go quite 
counter to it, which it is difficult to think was the Lord’s intention: Tan- 
tum hoe observemus in hac militid, quo a proposité parabola discedimus: 
ut quandoquidem hic hostis nunquam nobis honestas pacis conditiones pro- 
ponit, nos etiam nunquam cum ipso paciscamur, nec ullam pacem vel otium 
ab ipso expectemus, quamdiu mortalem hanc vitam in his terris degimus. 


8 


258 THE UNFINISHED TOWER 


profound is the lesson here, when we recognize in this king 
who might come against us with his twenty thousand, 
with a might altogether overpowering ours, no other 
than God Himself. He is a true fighter against God, a 
θεομάχος quite as truly, though in another way, as the 
openly ungodly, who would fain de anything in his sight, 
who, face to face with God, would assert himself at all; 
who does not renounce all that he hath, and, as that 
which is the dearest to him, and cleaves closest to the 
natural man, his own righteousness the first of all. 

The book of Job will supply the amplest and richest 
materials for the illustration of these words. The patri- 
arch himself was sorely tempted to be such a fighter 
against God, with his ten thousand to challenge Him with 
his twenty thousand. Early indeed in the great and 
terrible struggle of his life he has glimpses more than 
one of the madness of provoking to the conflict of 
righteousness such an adversary; as, for instance, when 
he exclaims, ‘How should man be just with God? If 
he will contend with Him, he cannot answer Him one of 
a thousand’ (ix. 2, 3); and again, ‘If I wash myself with 
snow-water, and make my hands never so clean, yet shalt 


* Bengel: Hee igitur rogatio pacis exprimit odinm anime propris [ver. 
26], quo quis, omni suitate abnegatd, mera se gratiw committit. Aldificator 
pecunias, belligerator copias, discipulus parentes et caritates omnes abnegat 
et impendit. Illi habent apparatum positivum, hic negativum. Ma‘donatus, 
who has almost always something valuable on the harder passages in Serip- 
tures, sees clearly that the king coming with his twenty thousand cannot 
be Satan, with whom we never must have peace, nay rather a πόλεμος 
ἄσπονδος: but only doubtfully suggests that by him God Himself may be 
intended: Mittere vero legationem et rogare que pacis sunt non est a 
diabolo, hoste capitali nostro, pacem petere, quocum perpetuum nobis bellum 
gerendum est, nec pacem unquam licet pangere. Nam et in pace vincimur ; 
hoc enim pejus et turpius; quod in bello quidem, ut milites decet, repug- 
nantes atque resistehtes, in pace volentes, sine vulnere, sine sanguine, 
superamur. 


AND THE DEPRECATED WAR. 259 


Thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall 
abhor me’ (ix. 30, 31); but at other times he is very far 
from having renounced all that he has; thus see xxiii. 
3-5, and indeed that chapter throughout. It is only at 
the last that he altogether does so, lays his hand upon 
his mouth, confesses that he has nothing with which to 
answer God (xl. 4), and abhors himself in dust and ashes 
(xlii. 5,6); demands, that is, conditions of peace, and, 
having demanded, obtains them (xlii. 7-17). St. Paul 
would have been another such fighter against God, if 
those things which he once counted gain he had resolved 
to count gain to the end; if, refusing to submit himself 
to the righteousness of God, he had stood out upon a 
righteousness of his own (Phil. iii. 3-9). But he also on 
the way to Damascus learned better; and when, with 
his face to the ground, he asked, ‘ What wilt Thou have 
me to do?’ he, too, was exactly falling in with that 
which Christ here declares to be the only wisdom for 
every man, demanding conditions of peace from that far 
mighter King, with whom it is impossible for flesh and 
blood, for sinful man, to contend." 


* I know none in the ancient Church, and only Bengel and Stier among 
modern interpreters, who have grasped the meaning of this portion of 
Scripture with at all so firm a hand as Gregory the Great has done. I have 
already quoted words of his on the only way in which the necessary cost 
for the building of the tower is to be got together. He too has apprehended 
rightly what so few have apprehended, namely, that the king who might 
come against us with his twenty thousand, with whom therefore it is 
prudent to make terms betimes, is not Satan, but God; thus Hom. 37 in 
Hoang.: Rex contra regem ex #quo venit ad pralium, et tamen si se per- 
pendit non posse sufficere, legationem mittit, et ea que pacis sunt postulat. 
Quibus ergo non lacrymis veniam sperare debemus, qui in illo tremendo 
examine cum Rege nostro ex «quo ad judicium non venimus? quos nimirum 
conditio, infirmitas, et causa inferiores exhibet... . Quid ergo agendum est, 
fratres, nisi ut dum nos cum simplo exercitu contra duplum illius sufficere 
non posse conspicimus, dum adhuc longe est, legationem mittamus, et 
rogemus ea que pacis sunt? Longe enim esse dicitur, qui adhuc presens 


8 2 


260 THE UNFINISHED TOWER 


We may take an example from the opposite side. 
The Pharisee in the parable (Luke xviii. g-14), when he 
enumerated the long catalogue of his virtues, was pre- 
cisely one who was refusing to forsake all that he had, 
rather was hugging this all as closely as he could. He 
was calculating his means, and finding that he had 
enough to finish the tower; he was mustering his forces, 
and so disastrously overrating their strength, that he did 
not fear to set himself in battle-array against Him who 
resisteth the proud, and giveth grace only unto the 
humble. The publican, on the contrary, in the same 
parable, was avowing that for the carrying up of the tower 
he had not enough, he had nothing; that the war was 
one in which he could not so much as look his mightier 
Adversary in the face; and exclaiming, ‘God be merciful 
to mea sinner, he threw down his arms, and sought, 
while there was yet time, conditions of peace. 

Let me observe, before quitting this matter, that there 
is a certain fine irony in our Lord’s falling in so far with 
man’s dream of being something and being able to hold 
his own even in the face of God, as to speak of him 
as a king over against another king, king against king— 
in his so far falling in with man’s dream of self-righteous- 
ness, and estimate of his own. powers, as to speak of 
the ten thousand which he could bring against the 
twenty thousand of God, as though he were only over- 
matched in the proportion of two to one; while, indeed, 
a day will arrive, when he who in Christ’s school has 


per judicium non videtur. Mittamus ad hunc legationem, lacrymas nostras, 
mittamus misericordis opera, cognoscamus nos cum eo in judicio non posse 
consistere, pensemus virtutem ejus fortitudinis, rogemus ea que pacis sunt. 
Hae est nostra legatio, qua Regem venientem placat. 


AND THE DEPRECATED WAR. 261 


learned anything which he ought to learn, will be ready 
to cry, ‘I cannot answer Thee one thing in a thousand.’ 

I ought not to leave unnoticed that some modern 
Roman Catholic expositors have sought to escape the 
difficulties which I have stated to cleave to the common 
interpretation of Christ’s words here in this way. They 
plead that they are not addressed to the whole body of 
disciples or candidates for discipleship, but only to as 
many as might be meditating whether they should under- 
take or not the so-called ‘ counsels of perfection.’ These 
are warned that they should accurately consider before- 
hand whether they have strength sufiicient for the fulfill- 
ing of these; and, if they discover that they have not, 
should not so much as attempt them. All this, as may 
be seen in the words,of one quoted below, is ingenious 
enough ;' and undoubtedly some difficulties would so be 
evaded ; but such an explanation contains no help for us, 
who believe that a// Christians are invited to be perfect, 
as their Father in heaven is perfect (Matt. v. 48), and who 
further can trace no intimation that these words were 
addressed to a select few, an inner circle, but on the 
contrary a statement the most distinct that they were 
spoken to ‘ great multitudes’ (ver. 25). 


* Cajetan: Significatur regis nomine professurus statum perfectioris vite. 
Bellum adversus alium regem est perfectior vita ad superandum mundum, 
quantum ad licita communiter aliis, puta, habere agros, vacare humanis 
negotiis, et reliqua hujusmodi, hominibus quidem licita, apostolic autem 
perfectioni interdicta. Et describitur mundus duplicatad potentid adversus 
profitentem vitam perfectiorem, quia et pugnat communi impugnatione, 
trahendo ad illicita communiter omnibus, et pugnat speciali mmpugnatione, 
trahendo ad interdicta apostolic vite. Si enim, consideraté proprii animi 
dispositione, imparem se videt tanto preelio, sapienter prwevenit, rogans ea 
qué pacis sunt, non aggreditur statum perfectioris vite, contentus statu 
communi, 


13. ZACCHAUS. 


Luke xix. 1-10. 


Tue Lord is on his way to Jerusalem, on that last journey 

thither, which was so rich in incidents, and whereof 
St. Luke has preserved for us so full and faithful a record. 
‘And Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. And 
behold there was a man named Zaccheeus, which was the 
chief among the publicans.* It was only natural that 
Jericho, from its position close to the fords of Jordan 
(Josh. ii. 1), and as the frontier city on entering the land 
from Perza, set, too, as it was in the richest plain of 
Palestine, and that which abounded most in the choicest 
productions of that favoured land, in the rare and costly 
balsam above all,’ should be the seat of an officer of a 
somewhat superior rank, who should there preside over 
the collection of the revenues of the state. 


* His superior dignity probably suggests ἀνήρ, not ἄνθρωπος, twice used 
in regard of him (ver. 1, 7). Whether he was one of the publicani, the 
farmers of the revenue, or held some intermediate rank between these and 
the portitores, the actual collectors of the customs and taxes, is uncertain; 
but the latter is the more probable supposition. The fact that the publicani 
were generally Romans, and Roman knights, would not indeed of itself be 
decisive on the matter; for Josephus tells us that Jews sometimes attained 
to this dignity. Yet is it more probable that the ἀρχιτελώνης belonged 
himself to the τελῶναι, although, as the name implies, having many sub- 
ordinate officers under him, 

* Pliny, Hist. Nat. xii. 54. 


ZACCH 4 US. 263 


Such an officer was Zacchzeus; one too who had not 
failed to win that wealth, for the sake of which he had 
been content to brave the contempt of his fellow-country- 
men, and, as a traitor to the national cause, to come 
under their uttermost scorn. And yet, rich as he 
was, he had not, as the sequel shews, incurred the woe 
of those rich who are full, and who have so received their 
consolation here, that all longings for a higher consolation 
are extinct in them (Luke vi. 24). We may take, as an 
evidence of this, the fact that ‘he sought to see Jesus,—who 
fe was ;’ not ‘who He was’ in the sense of ‘what 
manner of person ;’ but, ‘ which He was’ of that confused 
multitude, to distinguish Him from his company. And 
he sought this, as the issue proves, out of no mere 
curiosity, such as Herod’s (Luke xxiii. 8) ; but much more 
nearly in the temper of those Greeks who at the feast 
desired to see Jesus (John xii. 21). He may not have 
known, or given any account to himself, out of what 
motives this anxiety to see the Lord had its rise; yet 
assuredly there were yearnings here, unconscious they 
may have been, of the sick man toward his Healer, of 
the sinner toward his Saviour. 

Outward circumstances are unfavourable to the accom- 
plishment of his wish. ‘ He could not’ see Him ‘for the 
press, because he was little of stature.? So earnest, how- 
ever, is he in the matter, that, rather than be defeated of 
his longing, he devises a way for the satisfying of it, which 


* Maldonatus: Quis esset eorum quos in conferté et confusi videbat 
turba. 

* Augustine (Serm. 174): Noli te extollere; pusillus esto, Zacchus esto. 
Sed dicturus es, Si Zacchzeus fuero, prea turbi non potero videre Jesum. 
Noli esse tristis; adscende lignum, ubi pro te pependit Jesus, et videbis 
Jesum; with much other profitable adaptation of the words. 


264 ZACCH EUS. 


will involve, indeed, a certain compromise of his dignity, 
but from which he does not on this account shrink. 
Many, no doubt, will wonder that he, a rich man, and of 
some official position in the city, should climb up, like one 
of the populace, into a tree, the better to see a spectacle 
passing below. But there is that in him which will not 
allow such respects as these to have any weight at the 
present. He has not, or he overcomes, that false pride, 
out of which so many precious opportunities, and often- 
times in the highest things of all, are lost. Jericho and 
the neighbourhood was famous for its palms (‘the city of 
palm-trees, Deut. xxxiv. 3; Judg. ili. 13). No stately 
palm-tree, however, but a tree of much humbler name, 
plays its part in this story. There are no sycomores now 
in the plain of Jericho, although found elsewhere in the 
Holy Land (Robinson) ; but a sycomore on this occasion 
bore fruit of the noblest kind; so that Fuller with good 
right exclaims, ‘Who dares say sycomores are always 
barren? See one here loaden with good fruit.? For 
into one of these Zacchzeus climbs, hoping, it may be, for 
he has run before the multitude, effectually to conceal 
himself in its leafy screen, before the throng of the crowd 


* Calvin: Signum enim vehementis desiderii fuit, arborem conscendere, 
quum divites ut plurimum sint fastuosi, seque specie gravitatis venditent. 
Neque enim Christi conspectum sine cwlesti instinctu tantopere expeteret. 
Sic Dominus sepe priusquam se hominibus manifestet, cecum illis affectum 
inspirat, quo feruntur ad ipsum adhuc latentem et incognitum. 

* A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, ii. 12. From these words it is obvious 
that Fuller took for correct the old derivation of συκομωραία, finding μωρός 
foolish, and not μῶρον the mulberry tree, in the latter half of the word: 
porro sicomorus ficus fatwa dicitur, eo quod inanes ficus generat (Stella; 
and so Augustine, Serm. 174, ὃ 3). This, it need hardly be said, is an error, 
the sycomore deriving its name from aresemblance to the fig in its fruit, to 
the mulberry in its leaves. Ambrose (Zxp. in Lue. ix. ὃ 90): Zaccheus 
in sycomoro, noyum novi temporis pomum, 


ZACCH AUS. ὅς 


come by; these will be the less likely to remark him, as 
their attention will be turned in quite another direction. 
If this was at all his expectation, he is disappointed 
in it; for ‘when Jesus came to the place He looked up ;’ 
and He, who knows how to find his own in the most 
unlikely places, who had seen Nathanael under the fig- 
tree, with sure and unerring glance discerned Zacchzeus 
in the sycomore, and at once laid bare his hiding-place ; 
addressing him by his name, for ‘ He calleth his own 
sheep by name’ (John x. 3); and drawing him forth 
from his concealment with that word, ‘ Zaccheus, make 
haste and come down. ‘This dealing of the Lord with 
Zaccheeus is not unlike his compelling of the woman with 
an issue of blood to come out of the crowd, and to 
confess before all that she had touched Him, and why 
(Luke viii. 47). Like that, it is meant for the overcoming 
of a false shame ; and the words are not without a certain 
delicate rebuke that he should have chosen that method 
of seeing the Lord, instead of coming boldly forward, and 
joining himself to his disciples. Yet that faint rebuke 
was made good at once by the very gracious words that 
follow: ‘for to-day I must abide at thy house ;1 words of 
an extraordinary grace, for while the Lord accepted many 
invitations into the houses of men (Luke vii. 36; xiv.), 
yet we do not read that He honoured any but this one 
by thus offering Himself to his hospitality. ‘Adopting 
the royal style, as the author of Hece Homo puts it well, 
‘which was familiar to Him, and which commends the 
‘loyalty of a vassal in the most delicate manner, by 
freely exacting his services, He informed Zacchzeus of his 


* Augustine (Serm. 113): Volebas videre transeuntem; hodie hic apud 
te invenies habitantem. 


266 ZACCH 4 US. 


intention to visit him, and signified his pleasure that a 
banquet should be instantly prepared.’ 

The word of gracious command was not spoken in 
vain. Zaccheus was as ripe fruit, which dropped into 
the Saviour’s lap at his first and lightest touch: ‘ He 
made haste and came down, and received Him joyfully, 
Each had found what he was looking for, the Saviour 
- and the sinner; the Shepherd had found his sheep, and 
the sheep its Shepherd. Some, as usual, were displeased 
—as many as conceived of the Christ as a prince of 
Pharisees, rather than a Saviour of sinners. These, ‘ when 
they saw it, all murmured, saying, That He was gone to be a 
guest with a man that ts a sinner.* Could He not have 
chosen some other for his host? Jericho was a city of 
priests, as well as a city of publicans. The Talmudists 
tell us that there were almost as many priests there as 
at Jerusalem itself; so that it is a stroke from the life to 
introduce in the parable of the Good Samaritan the 
priest and the Levite, as passing exactly along that road 
which led from one of these cities where they dwelt to 
the other where their duties lay (Luke x. 31, 32).. With 
such a choice of hosts from whom to select, would it not 
have better become a preacher of righteousness to 
select some other than this sinner, whose house to honour 
with his presence? Surely it was ill done by a favour 
so signal to reverse that just sentence of social excom- 
munication under which the publicans, and Zacchzeus 
among the number, lay (Luke xv. 2). 

Probably the murmurers, with these words of discon- 
tent on their lips, with these thoughts of displeasure in 


* Augustine (Serm. 184): Hoe erat, reprehendere quod in domum groti 
intravit medicus. 


ZACCH AUS. 267 


their hearts, followed to the house of Zaccheeus. But 
they meet there with a practical refutation of their dis- 
content ; there it is plainly shewn that the Lord had 
chosen well, when He chose this man for his host and 
entertainer. He was one who was as smoking flax, which 
they would have quenched outright, but which the Lord 
with only a breath of his mouth fanned into a light 
flame. Christ’s presence in Ais house forms a parallel by 
way of contrast to his presence in the house of the 
Pharisee (Luke vii. 36; cf. xiv. 1). There he could 
bring no blessing, for there was there no sense of need ; 
there the Pharisee esteemed that he was honouring the 
Lord, not that he was being honoured by Him. 

Some place what follows on the next day, assuming 
the Lord to have tarried a night under the roof of 
Zaccheus, and that on the following morning, perhaps as 
his divine guest was about to depart, Zaccheus stood 
forth and made this profession of a new life, with a 
making good, so far as this might be, of the faults of his 
old. Yet I cannot but esteem the ‘to-day’ of ver. 5 to be 
too clearly taken up by ‘this day’ of ver. 9, to allow of 
such a supposition.’ Rather the meal was ended at 
which he had been permitted to entertain his Lord ; and 
he then stood forth, making that practical answer to these 
murmurers, which ought to have silenced, and perhaps 
did silence some of them; for it shewed that he had not 
received the grace of God in vain; it shewed what the 
condescending love of the Saviour could effect, how it 
could separate a man for ever from his old conversation, 


* Nothing can be built on κιταλῦσα!, as though, which some urge, this 
must imply the tarrying foranight. We have in Xenophon (Anabd, τ. το. 19), 
καταλῦσαι τὸ στράτευμα πρὸς ἄριστον. 


268 ZACCH AUS. 


to walk henceforward in newness of life. In the presence 
then of them all (see ver. 11), ‘ Zaccheeus,’ who had so long, 
like another Levi, sat at the receipt of custom, ‘stood,’ or 
stood forth, ‘and said unto the Lord; Behold, Lord, the 
half of my goods I give to the poor ; and if I have taken 
anything from any man by false accusation,’ I restore him 
fourfold. The present, ‘Z give,’ expresses the fixedness 
of his resolve. Although this distribution of his goods is 
still future, yet that future to him is as if actually present. 
To make it stand for a past, and to accept this ‘ Z give,’ 
and ‘ 7 restore, as an expression of his past conduct in 
the stewardship of this worldly mammon, as though 
Zacchzeus had been another Cornelius, ‘a devout man, 
which gave much alms to the people’ (Acts x. 2), isa 
curious missing and marring of the whole point of this 
incident, in fact a most notable piece of Pharisaic ex- 
egesis.” Zaccheeus might, and would even then, have 


* The verb συκοφαντεῖν occurs in the New Testament only here and at 
Luke iii. 144. It is rendered there, ‘to accuse falsely ;’ here ‘to take any- 
thing by false accusation ;’? andin the Geneva, ‘to take by forged cavillation.’ 
The use of the word as to defraud or to wring out by chicane is not un- 
common in the Greek orators. Rettig (Theoll. Stud. und Krit. 1838, p. 775) 
observes that, while the story of the forbidden export of figs from Attica, 
and of the συκοφάντης as one who denounced this, is, as all now admit, a 
later invention to explain the word, still it is so manifestly connected with 
σῦκον and φαίνειν, that in them the key to unlock its meaning must be 
looked for. He suggests that the συκοφάντης was originally one who informed 
against him who made to the State too small returns of his property for 
the purposes of taxation; and the figtree being a chief source of wealth 
in Attica, informed against him who returned the number of these, or the 
crop derived from them, below the mark. He observes that συκόβιος, an 
informer, and συκάζειν--- συκοφαντεῖν, both point in the same direction. 

*Maldonatus: Aliqui interpretantur quasi antequam ad ipsum Christus 
venisset, solitus fuisset dimidiam bonorum suorum partem pauperibus dare, 
et si quid quem defraudasset, quadruplum reddere. Cyprian (De Op. et 
Eleem.) is one of these; but many more adhere to the true interpretation, 
as Irensus (Con. Her. iv. 12), who sees in this to which Zaccheus adjudges 
himself, solutionem preterite cupiditatis; and Tertullian, Adv. Ma-cion. 
LV. 395 


ZACCH AUS. 269 


needed the higher righteousness of Christ, but he would 
scarcely have been until this day one of the ‘lost. 
Salvation would not on that day have first come to his 
house. But itis not thus. All this which he now an- 
nounces of a giving of his own, and a restoring of that 
which is another’s, is rather to be taken as the first-fruits 
of Christ’s visit, the outward utterance of the mighty in- 
ward change that had passed upon him. Now is he a 
righteous man according to that rule of the prophet 
(Ezek. xviii. 21, 22 ; xxxili. 15), and his name and he are 
agreed.’ 

Yet while the words, ‘/f 7 have taken anything from 
any man, must not be regarded as expressing only a 
possible case, which the speaker regards as very impro- 
bably an actual, neither must they be pressed too far in the 
other direction. It is not,indeed, such a confident clearing 
of himself as Samuel’s (1 Sam. xii. 3); yet neither, on the 
other hand, is it to be accepted as the confession and 
admission of an habitual unrighteousness, a free allowing _ 
of himself hitherto in chicane and wrong. Zacchzeus had 
been hitherto no extortioner. Had he been so, had he 
been conscious that his were in the main treasures of 
wickedness, gotten together by fraud and wrong, it would 
have been ridiculous to offer as a gift half of them to the 
poor, before it was seen whether the whole would satisfy 
the demands of justice, might not be swallowed up in 
acts of restitution, with such addition as the law re- 
quired. Without, however, having been this extortioner, 
he yet feels that, according to that higher standard of right 
which he recognizes now, some of his gains may prove to 


* "NDT=justus. Without restitution, as Augustine (Zp. liv. ad Maced.) 
says well, posnitentia non agitur, sed fingitur. 


270 ZACCH AUS. 


have been unfairly acquired ; for,as the Italian proverb 
has it, there is seldom a great stream into which some 
turbid water has not entered. Any such injustice he will 
make largely good, even to a fourfold restitution, calmly 
adjudging against himself that which David in his ex- 
treme indignation adjudged against him that had taken his 
neighbour’s lamb (2 Sam. xii. 6), imposing a maximum 
of penalty on himself; much more than the law save in 
some exceptional cases required (Exod. xxi. 9). 

The words that follow are spoken ¢o Zaccheeus, but in the 
hearing of the multitude, and for them no less than for 
him. This appears in the third person, under which he is 
addressed. As meant for him, they are an acceptance, 
on the Lord’s part, of this offering of his goods as the 
true expression of a higher offering, even of a dedication 
of himself to God: * This day is salvation come to this 
house.’ As addressed to the multitude, they contain a 
further justification of the grace shewn to this man that 
was a sinner. Sinner as he is, salvation has yet come 
to his house, ‘forasmuch as he also is a son of Abraham’ 
(cf. xiii. 16); one therefore to whom this mercy was due ; 
for their view, as may here be fitly observed, is worthy 
of no acceptance who assume Zacchzeus to have been a 
heathen, and the Lord therefore to style him ‘a son of 
Abraham’ only in an ethical sense, a follower, that is, of 
the faith of Abraham (Matt. iii.g; Rom. iv. 12). It is 
well known that some, both in ancient and modern times, 


* On the words ‘to this house,’ rather than ‘to this man,’ Grotius deli- 
cately remarks, ut ostendat relatam hospitii gratiam. Yet hardly so; the 
parallel is to be rather found in such passages as Acts xvi. 33, 34. It is 
doubtless for the sake of this verse that this Scripture supplies in the 
Roman Catholic Church the Gospel for the service on the occasion of the 
dedication of churches. 


ZACCH ΖΚ US. 271 


have so understood it, or at least have suggested this as 
possible, but in the face of all evidence alike external 
and internal. Zaccheeus (Zaccai) is a Jewish name, oc- 
curring Ezra ii.g; Nehem. vii. 14; 2 Macc. x. 19, and in 
the Talmud. Had he been not merely ‘a sinner,’ but ‘a 
sinner of the Gentiles, the murmuring multitudes would 
assuredly have urged as the head and front of Christ’s 
offending, not ‘that He was gone to be a guest with a 
sinner, but with ‘a@ Gentile’-—which, indeed, would 
have been in their sight so enormous an ageravation of 
the offence, that it would have been impossible they 
should pass it over without notice. Neither did it belong 
to the fitness of the Lord’s earthly life, ‘a minister’ as 
He was ‘of the circumcision, to confirm the promises 
made unto the fathers’ (Rom. xv. 8), that He should 
violate the ordinances and customs of the Jews, which, so 
acting, He would have done (Acts x. 28; xi. 2, 3; Gal. 
ii. 12). As little can any argument be founded on that 
word ‘dost, as applied to Zacchzeus; for elsewhere the 
Lord speaks of ‘the dost sheep of the house of Israel; 
and if, as surely is the case, the gulf between what a man 
is, and what he was intended to be, is the truly tragic 
thing in his destinies, is that which alone furnishes the 
proper measure of his loss and of his fall, who, then, so 
‘Jost’ as a son of Abraham, that, not being a heathen, was 
yet sunk down to a level with the heathen? Such was 
Zacchzeus; and such ‘lost’ as he was the Son of man 
declares that He was come ‘fo seek and to save. 

This said, He seems to have moved forward without 


*Thus Tertullian (Adv. Mare. iv. 37: Zaccheus, allophylus fortasse), 
Oyprian, Chrysostom, Maldonatus, Stella, and others. Some, on the other 
hand, have identified him with Matthias, the future apostle; Clement of 
Alexandria (Strom. iv. 6) for example. 


272 ZACCH EUS. 


further delay on his journey toward Jerusalem, leaving 
that ‘house’ poorer in this world’s riches, certainly by 
one half, and probably by more than one half, than if He 
had never entered into it; and yet, as He Himself de- 
clares, how immeasurably richer too; for One bringing 
salvation had lodged within it; and, though He was now 
quitting it for ever, the salvation which He had brought 
with Him remained behind. 


14. THE TRUE VINE. 
John xy. 1-6. 


Many interpreters have thought it necessary to look in 
the external world for some object which will have sug- 
gested this similitude to the mind of the Lord. Some, 
for example, who suppose that his ‘ Arise, let us go 
hence,’ with which the preceding chapter concluded, was 
not acted on at once, but that He lingered still, have 
imagined to themselves a spreading vine, whose branches 
found their way into the chamber in which He and his 
disciples had just celebrated their last'supper together (Ps. 
exxvill. 3). But surely those words of his, ‘ Arise, let 
us go hence,’ leave no room for this supposition. On the 
part of the disciples there could have been no tarrying, 
after they had received such a summons; and when the 
Lord used these words, He must have intended what He 
said. When others suggest that passing, as He may very 
well have done, through a vineyard on his way to the 
brook Kedron, He found his motive there, one can only 
reply that this and every other suggestion of like kind 
appear merely and altogether superfluous ; that it becomes 
us far better to believe that, as all worlds, natural and 
spiritual, lay ever open before Him, and the innermost 
essences of things, so he drew freely from this inexhaus- 
tible storehouse whatever was most adapted to his present 
T 


274 THE TRUE VINE. 


need. There was quite enough to suggest this image of 
closest union between Him and his people in that sacra- 
ment of union, which had just been instituted by Him, 
and in which He had declared of the fruit of the vine, of 
the ‘ pure blood of the grape’ (Gen. xlix. 11 ; Deut. xxxii. 
14), blessed and consecrated by Him, ‘This is my blood 
of the New Testament, which is shed, for many for the 
remission of sins.’ We may dismiss then, as unnecessary, 
all speculations on the external motive which He found 
for this discourse. 

At the same time when our Lord affirms of Himself, 
‘Iam the true vine, with what, it may be very fitly asked, 
does He liken Himself, over what claim a superiority ; 
for in that ‘true’ He manifestly claims actually to be 
what some other persons or things falsely pretended to 
be, or else to be fully and perfectly what they only par- 
tially, adequately, and most imperfectly were? The 
word which He employs is decisive that it is the latter 
which He intends ;' to keep which in mind will help us 
much to understand what follows. And first, He certainly 
does not liken Himself, which is Lampe’s suggestion, to 
that golden vine of exquisite workmanship, a symbol no 
doubt of the theocracy, which was one of the chief orna- 
ments of Herod’s temple, nor avouch Himself as ‘ the 
true vine, by comparison with it. And if not to that 
dead work of man’s art and device, as little does He name 
Himself ‘the true vine, as contradistinguished from the 


‘ For the distinction between ἀληθής and ἀληθινός see my Synonyms of 
the New Testament, § 8. ᾿Αληθῆς (=verax) is the true as set over against the 
false (Rom. iii. 4); ἀληθινός (=verus) is the true as set over against the 
imperfect, the inadequate, that which has at best but types, shadows, and 
outlines of the truth; as Origen puts it well, πρὸς ἀντιδιαστολὴν σκιᾶς καὶ 
τύπου καὶ εἰκόνος (cf. Johni. 9; vi. 32; Heb. viii. 2). 


THE TRUE VINE. 275 


natural plant. Not a few have understood Him thus. 
Tholuck, for example, has done so: ‘The Saviour would 
intimate here that the relation which finds place between 
the vine and its branches is one which reveals itself in 
its highest potency in the spiritual relation between the 
Saviour and them that believe on Him; the kingdom of 
nature being a prophecy of the kingdom of grace, so that 
in this last are found continually the fulfilments of the pro- 
phecies of the kingdom of nature.’’ This last, being most 
true, and earth the shadow of heaven, and the things on 
earth the copies of things in the heavens, is yet not the truth 
of this passage. An antagonism far deeper, and moving 
far more distinctly in the region of moral and spiritual 
things, the Lord would indicate here. The key to the 
right understanding of this statement lies, as was long 
ago noted by Grotius,’ in some words of Jeremiah, ‘ Yet 
I had planted thee a noble vine; wholly a right seed; 
how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a 
strange vine unto Me?’ (ii. 21) and Christ, claiming to be 
‘the true vine’ claims perfectly to realize in Himself that 
divine idea which Israel after the flesh had altogether 
failed to fulfil. Set as this ‘right seed, it had become 
‘an empty vine, which brought forth fruit to itself (Hos. 
x. 1), and none to God; and should end in becoming that 
‘vine of the earth,’ the clusters of whose grapes should 
be cast into the winepress of the wrath of God (Rev. 
xiv. 18-20). In confirmation of this view it is hardly 


* So Maldonatus: Quia melius et perfectius homines in se per fidem natos 
nutrit, quam sarmenta sua naturalis vitis. 
* Ergo cum se illam veram vitem vocat, intelligit sibi demum excellenter 
competere ista epitheta, Jer. ii. 21. Genuina, non fera vitis. 
3 Ἐγὼ δὲ ἐφύτευσά σε ἄμπελον καρποφόρον, πᾶσαν ἀληθινήν: πῶς ἐστράφης εἰς 
πικρίαν, ἡ ἄμπελος ἡ ἀλλοτρία; (LXX.) 
τ2 


276 THE TRUE VINE. 


necessary to observe that not in these passages only, but 
continually in the Old Testament the Jewish Church is 
set forth as a vine or vineyard (Ps. Ixxx. 8-16; Isai. v. 15, 
Cant. νὴ]. 11; Ezek. xix. 10-14), is rebuked for not 
being a true vine, for bearing grapes of Gomorrah, bitter 
fruit or none (Isai. v. 4; Deut. xxxii. 32; cf. 2 Kin. iv. 
39), our Lord taking up the same language in the New 
(Luke xiii. 6; Matt. xxi. 33). But what Israel should 
have been, and was not, this Christ, the true Israel, was. 
‘And my Kather is the husbandman.* This passage 
was a very favorite one with the Arians ; as many slight 
allusions or longer discussions on the part of those who 
took share in the Church’s great conflict with these gain- 
sayers, abundantly attest. The reason is obvious. The 
doctrinal statement of this verse, not qualified by other 
statements, was capable of being made to imply an entire 
subordination on the part of the Son to the Father, the 
relations in fact of a creature to a Creator. Augustine 
and other theologians before him are careful to reply that 
it is in his humanity that Christ is ‘the true vine. It was 
of the very essence of his mediatorial work, of the days- 
man who should lay his hands upon both, that as on the 


* The word which our Lord uses here is γεωργός, not ἀμπελουργός. It is 
true that ἀμπελουργός would more directly designate the actual cultivator 
of the vine, whose own hands dress and prune it; yet at the same time 
his office is altogether a subordinate one (see Luke xiii. 7); while γεωργός, 
by Philo distinguished from γεωπόνος or the actual labourer, in no way 
marks out a humble social status, as is sufficiently shown by such a passage 
as 2 Chron. xxvi. 10, where of King Uzziah it is said that he was a ‘husband- 
man’ (γεωργὸς 7”). Noah in like manner is called ἄνθρωπος γεωργὸς γῆς 
(Gen. ix. 20). So too by the γεωργοί of Matt. xxi. 33-41 are intended the 
chiefs and leaders of the Jewish theocracy. Not that the γεωργός need in 
the least be assumed to ‘pwrge’ or prune only by the hand of others. The 
labour of the vineyard is exactly of that lighter kind, in which the pro- 
prietor might be well pleased himself to take a share. 


THE TRUE VINE. 277 


one side He could say, ‘I and my Father are one, so 
upon the other, ‘I and my brethren are one; and He is 
here asserting the latter relation, not excluding the 
former.’ But while the vine and the vine-branches must 
thus both be partakers of the same nature, for He that 
sanctifieth and they that are sanctified must both be of 
one (Heb. ii. 11), He will presently challenge for Him- 
self, as Augustine does not fail to notice,’ a share in the 
work of the husbandman, an office, which, only as He is 
one with the husbandman of this allegory, He could have 
any right to challenge for his own. He too has power 
to purge or cleanse through his word (ver. 3). Neither, 
when we affirm that in his humanity He was ‘ the true 
vine, may we leave out of sight for a moment, that it 
was a divine humanity in which he was this, in a 
humanity united to his divinity, ennobled, deified, through 
this union; for only so could it have become a life-giving 
humanity to the world.’ 

Affirming his Father to be ‘the husbandman, He 
excludes none from his Father’s husbandry—not even, as 


* Ambrose (De Fide, iv. 12): Illud quoque ad separandam Patris et Filii 
divinitatem objicere consueverunt, quia Dominus dixit in Evangelio, Ego 
sum vitis vera, et Pater meus agricola est ; agricolam et vitem diverse esse 
nature dicentes, et vitem in agricole esse potestate. Ambrose answers 
rightly: Dominus vitem se esse dixit, incarnationis sus significans sacra- 
mentum. Basil the Great (Con. Hunom. iv. 3) puts the argument of the 
Arians: εἰ ἄμπελος, φασὶν, ὁ Σωτὴρ, κλήματα δὲ ἡμεῖς, γεωργὸς δὲ ὁ Πατήρ' τὰ 
δὲ κλήματα ὁμοφυῆ μὲν τῇ. ἀμπέλῳ, ἡ δὲ ἄμπελος οὐχ ὁμοφυὴς τῷ γεωργῷ, ὁμο- 
φυὴς μὲν ἡμῖν ὁ Ὑἱὸς, καὶ μέρος ἡμεῖς αὐτοῦ, οὐχ ὁμοφυὴς δὲ ὁ Ὑἱὸς τῷ Πατρὶ, 
ἀλλὰ κατὰ πάντα ἀλλότριος. Basil replies as Ambrose. 

? Augustine: Denique cum de Patre tanquam de agricola dixisset, quod 
infructuosos palmites tollat, fructuosos autem purget, ut plus afferant fruc- 
tum; continuo etiam seipsum mundatorem palmitum ostendens, Jam vos, 
inquit, mundi estis propter sermonem quem locutus sum vobis. Ecce et ipse 
mundator est palmituin, quod est agricole, non vitis, officium. 

* Augustine: Quamvis autem Christus vitis non esset, nisi homo esset, 
tamen istam gratiam palmitibus non preberet, nisi etiam Deus esset. 


278 THE TRUE VINE. 


Chrysostom will have it, Himself, the vine, any more than 
his disciples, the vine-branches. He too learned obedi- 
ence by the things which He suffered. All the trial and 
temptation of his walk upon earth, all ‘the contradiction 
of sinners’ which was allowed to come upon Hin, all in 
which it pleased the Father to bruise Him and put Him 
to grief (Isai. 111. 10), all the awaking of the sword 
against Him, Jehovah’s fellow (Zech. xiii. 7), this was 
throughout the discipline of his Father’s love; to which 
He was submitted the first, that He might so become a 
pattern to all those who came after. ‘ Wonder not,’ He 
would implicitly say to his disciples, ‘at the sufferings 
which are coming upon Me; they are part of my Father’s 
husbandry ; still less: wonder at your own; for “if these 
things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in 
the dry ?” ’—all being ‘ dry trees’ when brought into com- 
parison with Him. That suffering which to flesh and 
blood is always so unwelcome He sets here in how com- 
forting a light. It is a mark of the watchful care with 
which the heavenly husbandman is tending the vine, and 
the branches of the vine. 

‘ Hvery branch in Me that beareth not fruit He taketh 
away. There are then branches 7x Him, which are 
unfruitful, and which therefore are removed. Christ 
here anticipates the future condition of his Church; He 
contemplates a Church in which men shall find them- 
selves im Him; as all infants baptized into Christ are in 
Him; planted together in the likeness of his death; but 
for whom it remains themselves to determine whether by 
believing and obeying, they shall make the potential 
blessings of this position actually their own; whether that 
fellowship with Christ, which has been so freely given to 


THE TRUE VINE. 279 


them, shall unfold itself into the-new creation, into the 
whole Christian life; whether faith shall keep open the 
channels through which the power and grace and 
strength of Christ may flow into the soul, or unbelief 
shall stop them. The branches which shall have thus 
doomed themselves to unfruitfulness ‘ He taketh away. 
In the natural world branches of the vine, which are not 
good for that to which they were specially ordained, 
namely for the bearing of fruit, are good for nothing. 
There are trees which may be turned to secondary uses, 
if they fail to fulfil their primary. Not so the vine. As 
timber it is utterly valueless (Ezek. xv. 3,4). Itis with it 
exactly as with the saltless salt, which, having lost its 
savour, is fit only to be cast out of doors; both of them 
being meet emblems of the spiritual man who is not 
spiritual, who is good neither for the work of this world 
nor of a higher. But on this ‘ He taketh away’ what 
further might be fitly said may be better reserved for 
_ ver. 6, where the doom of the barren branches is more 
in detail set forth. 

‘And every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth* it, that 
ait may bring forth more fruit.” They assuredly are right 
who recognize in this ‘ He purgeth’ no direct, but only a 
secondary, allusion to temptations and afflictions, as the 


1 Alper, καθαίρει: suavis rhythmus, as Bengel observes; but it is nothing 
more, for the words are not related to one another. 

3 Pliny (Hist. Nat. xiv. 14): [Numa] ex imputata vite libari vina diis, 
nefas statuit; ratione excogitaté ut putare cogerentur, alias aratores, et 
pigri circa pericula arbusti; cf. c. xxii. From whomsoever this remarkable 
prohibition came, it had, we may be quite sure, a much deeper meaning 
than that merely economical which the Roman naturalist (naturalist in both 
senses of this word), ascribes to it here; has its points of contact with Heb. 
xii. 5-11, its dim reachings-out after a symbolic setting forth of the truth 
which there is declared. 


280 THE TRUE VINE. 


means by which this purging is effected. It is the whole 
process of sanctification, the circumcision of the Spirit, by 
whatever discipline brought about, of which Christ is 
speaking, and to which He pledges his Father here. At 
the same time, seeing that afflictions play so large, so 
necessary a part in this process of sanctification, it is in a 
secondary sense most true that there is here a reference 
to these. Regarded as a means of this purifying, as 
an evidence of the intention of the heavenly husband- 
man that the fruit-bearing branches shall be more fruitful 
still, these may be welcomed, may be contemplated in 
some sort as rewards of obedience. St. James bids the 
faithful to welcome them, for the blessing they bring 
with them (i. 2-4, 12), and compare Heb. ΧΙ]. 11; Rom. 
v. 3-5. To how many dealings of God with his own, 
mysterious, inscrutable, inexplicable otherwise, will this, 
kept properly in mind, furnish us with a key. Oftentimes 
the fine gold of some saint appears to us as if cleansed 
from all its dross; but the inexorable refiner, who sees 
with other eyes than ours, and detects remains of dross 
where we see only gold, flings it again into the furnace, 
that so it may be purer yet. Augustine has a striking 
image in illustration. Many a time, he observes, a por- 
trait seems perfect in the judgment of all eyes save those 
of the artist who drew it. Others would fain see him 
now to hold his hand; they count that he cannot improve 
it, perhaps may mar it; but he returns it to the easel, 
touches and retouches still. And why? Because, being 
this artist, there floats before his mind’s eye an ideal per- 
fection, to which hitherto his work has not attained; but 
to which he would fain see it approach more nearly yet. 
‘Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken 


THE TRUE VINE. 281 


unto you’—‘ clean’ and yet needing to be ‘ cleansed.’1 We 
have a hint here of the mystery of that double relation 
in which every believing man stands to God, of that 
double relation which is more fully and dogmatically 
stated in some of the Pauline Epistles; but which is yet 
distinctly anticipated here, and at John xili.10. The 
faithful in Christ Jesus are ‘ clean, being by faith justified 
from all things, and having thus a standing-ground before 
God; which yet is in some sort an ideal one,—their 
actual state, although ever approximating to this, yet still 
failing to correspond to it,—they therefore needing by 
the same faith to appropriate ever more and more of 
that sanctifying grace, those purifying influences, which 
continually stream forth from Him on all them that are 
his; and by aid of which He is bringing them ¢o de all 
that, which for his sake his Father has been already 
willing to regard them.’ 


1 Καθαροί, and yet of those whom the husbandman καθαίρει (ver. 2). Here 
there is a real connexion between the words, which we would gladly have 
seen reproduced in our Version. Augustine: Mundi atque mundandi. Neque 
enim, nisi mundi essent, fructum ferre potuissent; et tamen omnem, qui 
fert fructum, purgat agricola, ut fructum plus afferat. Fert fructum, quia 
mundus est; atque ut plus afferat, purgatur adhue. Quis enim in hac vita 
sic mundus, ut non sit magis magisque mundandus? 

* Gerhard (Harm. Evang. 177): Quia dixerat Patrem purgare palmites 
fructuosos Christo insitos, ideo docet duplicem esse purgationem, videlicet 
purgationem primam, que est ipsa justificativ in remissione peccatorum 
consistens, atque insitionem in Christum, veram illam vitem, indivulso nexu 
conjunctam habens; et purgationem secundam, que consistit in quotidiand 
renovatione ac veteris Adami mortificatione, ques non semel tantum fit, sicut 
regeneratio et in vitem insitio, sed singulis diebus repetitur, et per totam 
vitam continuatur. . . . Quia mundatio fit per verbum, ergo non immediate, 
sed per ministros Ecclesies verbum predicantes et sacramenta administrantes, 
qui in hoc mundationis opere sunt Dei συνεργοί (1 Cor. iii. 9). . . . Christus 
non dicit, Mundi estis propter sermonem, quem inspiravi vobis, sed, quem 
locutus sum vobis. Ergo verbo pradicato et audito vim mundandi tribuit, 
quam ipso actu exserit, si fide recipitur. 


282 THE TRUE VINE. 


‘ Abide in Me, and Tin you. As the branch cannot bear 
Srut of itself, except τέ abide in the vine, no more can ye, 
except ye abide in Me. Our Lord in his first words here 
does not say, as He is so often taken to say, ‘ If you abide 
in Me, I will also abide in you.’ The second clause in 
this sentence is not promise, any more than the first ; they 
are precept both: ‘ Take heed that ye abide in Me, and 
that I abide in you.’ The next verse, where the same 
words recur, and still more ver. 7, are decisive on this 
matter; see also vi. 56. It is of course only in a very 
restricted sense that the relations between Him and them 
are mutual. There is no correlation of forces. He is 
throughout and only a giver, they are throughout and 
only receivers.” The mystical use of this word ‘ to abide,’ 
representing as it does the innermost fellowship and com- 
munion of the faithful with their Lord, and of their Lord 
with them, and occasionally representing a higher mystery 
still (John xiv. 10; xv. 10), is peculiar to St. John, but 
is very frequent both in his Gospel and in his Epistles, in 
the language of his Lord, and in his own which he has 
learned from that Lord.’ 


* We must not therefore complete κἀγὼ ἐν ὑμῖν with μενῶ, but with 
μείνω. Bengel gives it well: Facite ut maneatis in me, δύ ut ego maneam in 
vobis. Godet’s words are worth quoting here (Comm. sur U Bvang. de 
S. Jean): En moi exprime Vétat dans lequel le chrétien fait abstraction de 
tout ce qui est sa sagesse, sa force, son mérite propre, pour puiser tout en 
Christ, sous ces différents rapports, par Vintime aspiration de la foi. Et 
e’est ld unique condition de Vactivité de Christ en nous. Jésus le fait 
sentir en supprimant ἃ dessein le verbe dans la proposition suivante. Z¢ 
moi en vous. Par cette ellipse il enveloppe le second de ces deux faits dans 
Je premier de telle sorte que Ἰὰ ot le premier s’accomplit, le second ne peut 
manquer d’arriver. De cette maniére l’action de Christ est mise hardiment 
sous l’empire de notre liberté, aussi bien que la nétre propre. 

? Augustine: Ita in vite palmites sunt, ut viti non conferant, sed inde 
accipiant, unde vivant ; ita vero vitis est in palmitibus, ut vitale alimentum 
subministret eis, non sumat ab eis. 

* Besides the μένειν ἐν ἐμοί here, or ἐν αὐτῶ (1 Ep. ii. 6) we have also 


‘ 


THE TRUE VINE. 283 


‘I am the vine, ye are the branches. Our Lord willingly 
repeats great truths which He would deeply imprint on the 
minds of his disciples ; thus see John ili. 3, 5; vi. 48, 51; 
but in those places, as in this, with a variation, with a 
greater fulness on the second occasion than on the first, 
or with some other modification, which sufficiently justi- 
fies the repetition. In the present instance He now for 
the first time explicitly calls the disciples ‘the branches, 
however there may have been as much involved in words 
which He had uttered already. So, too, while He had 
already declared the abiding in Him to be the one con- 
dition of all fruit-bearing, He adds a promise now, that 
he who abides in Him shall not only bear fruit, but shall 
bear it abundantly : ‘He that abideth in Me, and I in 
him, the same bringeth forth much fruit ; for without Me 
ye can do nothing.’ 

It is a poor and inadequate interpretation of these last 
words to make them to mean, ‘Ye can do nothing until 
ye are in Me, and have my grace.’ It is rather, ‘ After 
ye are in Me, ye can even then accomplish nothing except 
as ye draav life and strength from Me; only through a 
putting forth of my power which is in you can ye com- 
mence, carry forward, or bring any work to a good effect. 
From first to last it is I that must work in and through 
you. We have a warning here to the regenerate man 
that he never seek to do aught of himself; not a declara- 
tion that the unregenerate is unable to do aught. Christ 
does not mean, ‘Out of and apart from Me ye are power- 
μένειν ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ (XV. 9); ἐν τῷ λόγῳ (Vili. 31); ἐν τῷ φωτί (1 Ep. ii. 10); 
ἐν τῇ διδαχῇ (2 Ep. ix.) ; ἐν τῷ Πατρί (1 Ep. ii. 24); ἐν τῷ Θεῳ (1 Ep. iv. 16); 
all expressing, though from slightly different points of view, the same 


blessed and transcendant truth; and then, as the fearful contrast to all these, 
there is the μένειν ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ (xii. 46); ἐν τῷ θανάτῳ (x Ep. iii. 14). 


284 THE TRUE VINE. 


less for good ;’ but, ‘ Being in Me, only through putting 
forth of my power, suffering Me effectually to work 
in and through you, can you accomplish anything ’— 
a truth which needs to be evermore repeated, for it is 
evermore in danger of being forgotten by us. The words 
are frequently appealed to by Augustine and others 
engaged in controversy with the Pelagians of old;* even 
as in the formularies and symbolic books of the Reformed 
Churches they constantly appear as a dictum probans 
against all open or covert Pelagianism. 

‘If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, 
and 15 withered’ (cf. Ezek. xvii. 24; Matt. xxi.19; Mark 
xi. 20, 21; Luke xxiii. 31). Some will fain have it that 
in giving these words their spiritual significance we must 
reverse their order, urging that the branch, because 
withered, is therefore cast forth, and not, .because cast 
forth, therefore withered. But it is not so, either in the 
natural world or the spiritual; and there is no sufficient 
reason for deserting the actual sequence. of Christ’s 
words, which only the strongest necessity should compel 
us to abandon. But, so far from such necessitye existing, 
the declaration, as it now stands, yields a lesson the most 
solemn, one which, changing the order of the words, we 
should in good part miss. An unfruitful branch is not 
‘withered, when broken off from its parent stock and 
stem ; on the contrary, it retains a deceitful greenness and 


* Thus Augustine (δ. duas Ep. Pelag. ii. 8): Dominus autem ut respon- 
deret futuro Pelagio, non ait, Sine me difficilé potestis aliquid facere, sed 
ait, Sine me nihil potestis facere. Et ut responderet futuris etiam istis in 
eidem ipsi EvangelicA sententid, non ait, Sine me nihil potestis perficere, 
sed, facere. Nam si perficere dixisset, possent isti respondere, non ad incipi- ἡ 
endum bonum, quod a nobis est, sed ad perficiendum, esse Dei adjutorium 
necessarium. Dominus cum ait, Sine me nihil potestis facere, hoc uno verbo 
initium finemque comprehendit. 


THE TRUE VINE. 285 


freshness fora little while ; deceitful, because upon all this 
the sentence of death has irrevocably passed. Churches, 
which, through abandonment of the Catholic faith, indi- 
viduals who, by unbelief and by the sins which spring from 
unbelief, have separated themselves off, and in the awful 
but secret judgments of God have been separated off, from 
Christ their Head, may keep for a while the show and 
semblance of life, may deceive others, may deceive even 
themselves—so long, that is, as any residue of that good 
thing which they have gotten from Christ remains. But 
little by little, sooner or later, they come to an end of all 
which they took with them. It fails and dies out, and, 
once wasted and gone, there is nothing to replace it; and 
thus death, moral and spiritual, steals over all; they are 
‘withered, this withering of theirs being not seldom evi- 
dent to the eyes of all. 

“And men gather them; or, better, ‘and they gather 
them, bring them together into one bundle of death,’ 
leaving who the gatherers are in the awful obscurity 
which rests upon it in the original. Some words of 
Isaiah, ‘ When the boughs thereof are withered, they shall 
be broken off; the women come, and set them on fire’ 
(xxvii. 11), constitute an interesting parallel. The ga- 
therers are the angels, the ministers of the divine anger, 
to whom the final execution of the divine judgments is 
everywhere committed (Matt. xiii. 41, 49; xxiv. 31; Luke 
xix. 24; Rev. xix. 24). ‘And cast them into the fire, and 
they are burned ;’ or, in its simplicity more terrible still, and 
they burn’ cf. Ezek. xv. 4). But all which is here expressed 
or implied, of ‘ the fire’ (Matt. iii. 10), ‘ the flame’ (Luke 


1 Συνάγουσι: of. συλ λέξουσι, Matt. xiii. 41; and Isai. xxiv. 2. 


286 THE TRUE VINE. 


Xvi. 24), ‘the flaming fire’ (2 Thess. i. 8), ‘the furnace of fire’ 
(Matt. xiii. 42, 50), ‘the gehenna of fire’ (Matt. v. 22; 
Mark ix. 43), ‘the lake of fire’ (Rev. xx. 15; xxi. 8), 
‘the everlasting fire’ (Matt. xxv. 41; Jude 7), with all the 
secrets of anguish which words like these, if there be any 
truth in words, must involve, demands rather to be 
trembled at than needs to be expounded. 

We pause here. It is true that echoes and remi- 
niscences of this allegory still recur through the chapter, 
very distinctly in the next three or four verses, where 
exhortations are clothed in imagery which it offers, pro- 
mises linked with a fulfilling by disciples, of all which 
the fact of being branches in Him implies, means by 
which these shall abide in his love declared; but these 
reminiscences are ever growing weaker and weaker; the 
vine and the vine-branches more and more fade out of 
sight ; so that after this verse there is nothing which of 
necessity links itself on to this allegory, or which would 
not be perfectly intelligible without any reference to it, 
and supposing that Christ had never uttered it. Here, 
therefore, is the fittest place to pause. 


15. THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 
Luke xxiii. 39-43. 


We might beforehand have anticipated that, were the 
history of the penitent malefactor recorded in one Gospel 
only, it would be in the Gospel of St. Luke; which is above 
all the Gospel of pardon and grace, and among the Gospels 
the correlative of the Pauline Epistles among the Epistles. 
St. Luke, the companion of St. Paul, lays, more than any 
other Evangelist, the groundwork upon which the latter 
builds ; teaching historically that which St. Paul teaches 
dogmatically, namely, that where sin abounded, grace did 
much more abound (vii. 47; Xv.; xix. 10). We have in 
the history before us an example, and a very notable 
one, of that wondrous law of selection, according to 
which, out of the inexhaustible treasure-house of our 
Lord’s sayings and doings upon earth, each Evangelist 
severally appropriates that which agrees best with his 
special purpose and aim. Such a law we may continually 
recognize, so soon as the eye is once opened to look for 
and expect it. 

We read in the verses which immediately precede this 
wondrous story, of the wild flood of blasphemy and scorn 
which foamed and raged so fiercely round the foot of the 


288 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


cross ; how his soul that hung on that cross was pierced 
and stabbed with taunts and reproaches, with words of 
malignity and hate, sharper and keener far than the nails 
which had torn his hands and his feet, or the spear which 
should penetrate his side. We read how heathen and Jew, 
as in a dreadful rivalry, vied with one another, which 
should heap most of outrage upon the Christ of God; 
the very chiefs of the Jewish nation, throwing off not 
merely all dignity, but all decency and decorum, and in 
the fierce delight of gratified hatred not caring to main- 
tain even the religious hypocrisies which should have 
hindered them from openly rejoicing in the sufferings of 
another, being the first and foremost of all in this crucifying 
afresh, this moral crucifixion superinduced upon the phy- 
sical, of the Son of God (Heb. vi. 6). And then, as though 
to crown all, St. Matthew (xxvii. 38) and St. Mark (xv. 32) 
relate that two fellow-sufferers with our Lord, two who, 
fulfilling the prophecy made long before (Isai. liii. g, 12), 
were crucified with Him, fell in with and took up the 
taunts of the crowd, railed upon Him, mocked his pre- 
tensions, bade Him, if He were the Christ, to save Himself 
and them—a fearful example, whether one only, or, for 
a while at least, both acted thus, that the Greek proverb 
which ascribes to sufferings such a teaching power,’ comes 
not always true, that there are whom their own suffer- 
ings and the just punishments of God do not soften, but 
only harden and exasperate the more; so that they may 
howl upon their bed, nay, writhe upon their cross, and 
yet not repent them of the evil which has provoked these 
plagues, but only go forward, adding new sin to their 


? Παθήματα, μαθήματα, or in Latin, Nocumenta, documenta. 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 289 


old, fierce, impenitent, and defiant to the last (Rev. xvi. 9, 
11 2; 2 Chron, xx vl, 22). 

St. Luke, indeed, tells us that not both, but that ‘one of 
the malefactors which were hanged railed on Him, saying, 
If Thou be Christ, save Thyself and us” A question 
presents itself here, Does the statement of the earlier 
Evangelists, and the necessity of harmonizing the several 
relations, require us to assume that he, who later in the 
day became a penitent, joined at first in these blasphemous 
ravings of his fellow-malefactor and of the multitude, and 
only after a while separated his lot from theirs, being 
convinced and converted by all the wondrous evidences of 
a divine grace and love which shone out in the suffering 
Lord? ΤῸ this, which of course enhances the marvel of 
his conversion, making it still more sudden and mira- 
culous, many interpreters in all ages have considered 
themselves bound by the statements of the preceding 
Evangelists; as counting that only by such an assump- 
tion was it possible to reconcile St. Luke’s account with 
theirs. Thus Chrysostom,’ Theophylact, Leo the Great.’ 
Ambrose is more doubtful.* Augustine, on the contrary, 
is strong that one only blasphemed,’ urging as a parallel 


’ The effects of crucifixion were very various on those who endured it. 
While the Christian martyrs would praise God from their cross, or exhort 
the beholders to embrace that faith for the sake of which they were willing 
to endure even that worst, some would spit on the bystanders (Seneca, De 
Vitd Beatd, 19), or reveal hidden iniquities of their former life, or blaspheme 
their judge, to render which last impossible it was not unfrequent to gag 
them ; Cicero mentions a slave whose tongue was cut out before crucifixion for 
fear of inconvenient revelations which he might make from his cross (Pre 
Cluent. 66; cf. Justin, Hist. xxii. 7). 

* See Suicer, Thes. 5. v. λῃστής. 

* Usque ad crucem reus, fit Christi repente confessor. 

4 Fortasse et iste prius conviciatus est. 

° De Cons. Evang. iii. 16. 


U 


200)" THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


case the words of Heb. xi. 33, ‘they stopped the mouths 
of lions,’ when, in fact, it was but one, namely Daniel, 
who did so; ‘they were sawn asunder ;’ when, in all like- 
lihood, the allusion is but to one, namely to Isaiah. His 
parallel cases do not seem to me very convincing, yet, on 
the whole, I must decidedly incline to the conclusion at 
which he has arrived. The internal evidence in its 
favourisstrong. The rebuke with which the penitent 
malefactor rebukes his fellow is very little like that of 
one, who has just been partaker in the sin which he 
condemns. His deliberate remonstrance, with no word of 
reference to himself, ‘ Dost not thou fear God, being in 
the same condemnation? sounds not at all like the re- 
monstrance of one,—would have fitted ill, in that shape 
at least, to the lips of one,—who had just before been 
joining in the blasphemies, which all of a sudden he 
condemns.’ 

Up to the moment when his fellow-malefactor joined 
in the railings of the multitude, he, we may suppose, had 
listened in silence ; the work of grace which had begun 
in him sometime since, in his prison perhaps, going 
rapidly forward; for all around him and about him was 
such as would rapidly ripen a man for heaven, or for 
hell. The other it ripened for hell, him for heaven. 
He had heard all—in silence, though with deep horror 
of soul; but now he can keep silence no longer. There 
is a time to speak (Kccles. iii. 7), as well as a time to 
keep silence, and now for him that time has arrived. ᾿ In 
that ‘Save Thyself and us, in that plural ‘us,’ the other 
is seeking to draw him into the same blasphemy with 


* Cajetan : Προ namque verba sonant non peenitentem convicii proprii, sed 
increpantem alterius, quod simul cum aliis insultet Jesu. 


THE PHENITENT MALEFACTOR. 291 


himself, is presenting this as the common taunt of them 
both. Need is therefore that he should speak, that he 
should separate himself off by a clear and distinct avowal 
from the other’s sin, and not, by any longer holding his 
peace, become partaker of it. ‘The English Version here, 
‘Dost not thou fear God?’ is doubly at fault, missing the 
emphasis twice. Read rather, ‘Nether dost thou fear 
God?’ ‘It is nothing so strange,’ he would say, ‘ that these 
secure sinners, whom justice has not yet overtaken, for 
whom God’s judgments are as yet far out of sight, should 
dare thus to open their mouths against the Holy One of 
God; but thou, upon thy cross, with such teaching as 
that might give thee, with such evidence as that affords 
that God is not mocked, that men eat the fruit of their 
doings, dost thou venture upon the same? nevther 
dost thou fear God?’* He goes on, ‘ being in the same 
condemnation. Two reasons are here alleged why he 
should have refused to become partaker of the sin of 
those mockers ; the first, which already lay in that ques- 
tion we have just dealt with, that he was in condemna- 
tion, that judgment had overtaken him ; the second, that 
Jesus was a fellow-sufferer ; community of suffering might 
have well inspired forbearance and pity of the one for 
the other. 

And then, lest this word should seem to imply that 
they all shared in a common cross because they had 


*Maldonatus: Non dubito quin bonus 1116 et fidelis latro perversum 
illum latronem cum Judeis voluerit comparare, que comparatio in illa dic- 
tione nec obscure delitescit; quasi dicat, Non solum illi qui pend carent, 
sed nec tu, qui in eAdem pond es, Deum times? Oorn. ἃ Lapide: Esto, 
Scribe et Judei liberi et validi non timeant Deum, ideoque subsannent 
Christum; tu tamen, qui in cruce torqueris et ad mortem tendis, deberes 
timere Deum. 


U2 


292 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


shared in a common or like crime, he separates and 
distinguishes between Christ’s cross and theirs. The 
condemnation indeed is common to all; but not so the 
guilt ; ‘and we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward 
of our deeds ; but this man hath done nothing amiss ; so 
far from having committed enormous crimes, as we have, 
there is no smallest fault or error in Him;’—another 
reason why he should be spared these outrages and 
insults. If these are for any, they are for the wicked, 
not for the holy.’ 

Let us, before proceeding further, endeavour to realize 
to ourselves what manner of persons these ‘ malefactors’ 
probably were, how they had deserved this name, and 
by the course of what crimes they had reached a Roman 
cross, as the end of their conversation, as the due reward 
of their deeds. To understand this will, I am persuaded, 
help us not a little to understand how one of those 
crucified with Jesus should, even in the hour of his own 
worst suffering, have turned to the Lord with scorn and 
defiance, the other with penitence and prayer. Both these 
facts may, through such an enquiry, become more intel- 
ligible to us. ‘ Malefactors’ is the name by which St. 
Luke calls them; ‘7¢hieves’ (according to our Version) the 
two earlier Evangelists; from whom, and from the blend- 
ing of whose record with his, we have learned to speak of 
‘the penitent thief. Our Translators would have done 


* Maldonatus: οὐδὲν ἄτοπον, nihil quod virum bonum non deceat; quibus 
verbis indicare voluit non solum nullum magnun scelus, sed nullum etiam 
vel levissimum peccatum in Christo esse. Yet ἄτοπος is too often used in 
Hellenistic Greek as a mere equivalent of πονηρός (it is joined with it, 
2 Thess. iii. 2), to allow us very confidently to press this. 

* Maldonatus: Cum in eAdem qué Christus peend verseris, et, quod plus 
est, tu quidem merito, ille vero immerito, tamen neque pene societas, nec 
ejus te movet innocentia, ut ejus misereare. 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 293 


much better to maintain the distinction which the 
Scripture maintains between him, the ‘robber, or vio- 
lent spoiler (see Matt. xxi. 13; ΧΧΥΙ. 35; Luke xxii. 52; 
John xviii. 40; 2 Cor. xi. 26), and the ‘thief, or secret 
y purloiner (Matt. vi. 19; John xii. 6; 1 Thess. v. 2; Rev. 
‘iii. 3; xvi. 15). Many passages have suffered in our 
Version from the neglect of this distinction, but none so 
seriously as that with which we now have to do.’ 

These two were not ‘thieves,’ as we have called them, 
but robbers. Having vindicated this title for them, we 
may further enquire what at this time the name probably 
implied, and whether more than lies on the surface of the 
word. Toanswer this question aright, we must put side by 
side the application of the title of ‘robber’ to Barabbas 
(John xviii. 40), and the other notices of him which the 
Gospels supply, and read all in the light which contem- 
porary history affords. Barabbas, this ‘robber’ accord- 
ing to St. John, was, we are told, ‘a notable prisoner’ 
(Matt. xxvii. 16) ; ‘which lay bound with them that had 
made insurrection with him, who had committed murder 
in the insurrection’ (Mark xv. 7); ‘who for a certain 
sedition made in the city, and for murder, was cast into 
prison’ (Luke xxiii. 19) ; plainly a ringleader in one of 
those fierce and fanatic outbreaks against the Roman 
domination, which on a large scale or a small so fast 
succeeded one another in the latter days of the Jewish 
commonwealth. This at once explains how it was pos- 
sible for the Chief Priests with their religious pretensions 
to shew the interest on his behalf which they did (Matt. 
xxvii. 20; Mark xv. 11), explains no less the enthusiasm 


1 On the distinction between λῃστής and κλέπτης see my Synonyms of the 
New Testament, § 44. 


294 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


with which the Jewish populace demanded his liberation 
(Luke xxiii. 18). He was the popular hero, who had 
sought to realize his own and their idea of the kingdom 
of God by violence and blood. He had actually been 
that which they wanted*the Lord to be, and which’ 
because He would not be, they were now so eager to 
destroy Him. He had wrought, we may well believe, in 
that false Messias spirit, which was filling with wild and 
insane hopes the whole nation, and rapidly hurrying it 
to that final conflict with the Roman power, in which as 
a nation it should be for ever broken in pieces. There is 
every likelihood that the two malefactors crucified with 
Jesus belonged to the band of Barabbas. For good or 
for evil they knew something about the Christ, and that 
He was One who could deliver his own; the taunt 
uttered by the one expresses this, no less than the prayer 
of the other. There is much to make this probable. 
Barabbas, as we have seen, had been cast into prison 
‘with them that had made insurrection with him. Two 
of the chief of these Pilate may have been very well 
pleased to send to execution on this occasion. It is 
abundantly plain from John xix. 15, 19-21, that he was 
willing in any way to retort on those who had driven him 
to what his conscience told him was a hideous injustice, 
to the condemnation (for this much he could see), of a 
perfectly innocent man. As he evidently sought in that 
title over the cross to do an extreme displeasure to the 
Jews, so he may have sought the same in this: ‘If you 
compel me against my better mind to send this man to 
the cross, I will send, to keep him company, two of the 
servants of your Messiah.’ 
Such seems to me a more probable explanation—I 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 295 


speak but of the human explanation—of these malefactors * 


sharing in the cross of Christ, than to suppose that the 
additional indignity of being thus ‘numbered with the 
transgressors’ was devised for Him by the Pharisees. 
Doubtless they were quite capable of such a malignity, 
and insults of exactly this character have not seldom been 


heaped on high-souled sufferers in the concluding scene | 


of their lives. Thus in the French Revolution, when 
some noble royalist was sent to the guillotine, it was con- 
stantly managed to mix up his execution with that of 


forgers, highwaymen, murderers, or the like; that their | 


shame and disgrace might, if possible, redound upon him ; 
and this last drop of bitterness might not be wanting 


in his cup of pain. It is not that the Pharisees would have - 


been behind the worst in modern times in any such subtle 
inventions of hate; but the ordering of malefactors to 
execution lay in other hands than theirs; and there is 
nothing to make us think that Pilate would have devised 
any additional insult for Him whom he would have 
certainly set free, if his consciousness of innumerable acts 
of violence and rapine and wrong, whereof the Jews 
might accuse him to Cesar, had not made him the 
miserable coward that he was. It was the Pharisees 
whom he desired, so far as he dared, to wound. 

Whether, indeed, Barabbas had actually played the 
part of a false Christ, setting himself up as the true, we 
have no means of knowing. It is certainly far from 
unlikely. Keeping in mind the significance of names in 
Scripture, we can hardly fail to recognize a fearful 
mockery in his name, Barabbas, or ‘Son of the Father ;’ 
as though in the very name which he bore, not to speak 
of the work which he wrought, he should be the devil’s 


296 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR, 


counterfeit and caricature of the true Holy One of God. 
This suggestion would acquire increased probability, if it 
could certainly be affirmed that he was not merely named 
Barabbas, but Jesus Barabbas, the lying counterpart, even 
to his human name, of the true Saviour of men. So, as 
is well known, three manuscripts, at Matt. xxvii. 17, even 
to this day read, and two of the older Versions, the 
Armenian and the Syriac; and that this was the prevailing 
reading in the time of Origen is sufficiently clear from 
some words which he uses; for, speaking of many copies 
in which Barabbas was not called also Jesus, he implies 
that, many as they were, they were still in the minority.’ 
In support of this remarkable reading, which Tischendorf, 
Fritzsche, Meyer, Rinck’ approve, but Lachmann, Alford, 
Tregelles’ reject, it may be wrged, that while we can scarcely 
conceive anyone daring to introduce the sacred name of 
Jesus, to give it to Barabbas, while it is difficult, almost 
impossible, to imagine such a thought suggesting itself to 
the mind of any, we can very well understand that many 
transcribers should have been shocked to find it there; 
and marring the text, which they impertinently sought to 
mend, have ventured to omit it. Certainly too, it must 
be allowed that there appear vestiges of the existence of 
such a reading in the text as it now stands; the words, 
‘which is called Christ, twice introduced after the human 
name of our blessed Lord on the occasions when Barabbas 
is brought into opposition to Him (Matt. xxvii. 17, 22), 
and nowhere else, seem to be employed by Pilate out of 
a necessity to distinguish between Him and another who 


‘In multis exemplaribus non continetur quod Barabbas etiam Jesus 
dicebatur, et forsitan recte, ut ne nomen Jesus conveniat alicui iniquorum. 

5 Lucub. Crit. p. 285. 

* On tie Printed Text of the Greek Testament, p. 194. 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 297 


bore the name of Jesus as well. It is at first strangely 
startling to think that this identity of name could possibly 
have existed; and yet He who bore every other scorn 
and shame, why should He not have also borne this? 

All which has just been said being kept in remem- 
brance, it will surprise us less, that so many elements of 
nobleness should display themselves in strength in one of 
these malefactors, than if we regarded him merely as a 
criminal of that meaner stamp whom we designate as a 
thief, or even as a robber, in our ordinary use of that 
word. His had been no petty larcenies; as little in all 
likelihood had he meant at the beginning to have his 
living by violence and wrong. Those whom the Romans. 
with a certain amount of truth called ‘robbers, were often- 
times wild and stormy zealots; maintaining in arms a last 
and hopeless protest against that yoke of the stranger, 
which God had imposed on his people for the chastise- 
ment of their sins, and which therefore it behoved them 
meekly to accept. This may have been one of these, 
seeking at the outset of his career to work by the wrath 
of man what he counted the righteousness of God.' 
Presently a fugitive from Roman justice, compelled to take 
to the mountains, and to live there by rapine, he may 
have gradually learned less and less to discriminate 
between friend and foe, may have earned only too well 
the title under which he was at last to expiate his offences 
on a Roman cross. 

His own confession implies as much (ver. 41). How 
easily, under such conditions, those who'have begun with 


* In theyrecord by Josephus of the final agony of Jerusalem the ζηλωτής 
and the λῃστής become nearly, or indeed altogether, convertible terms ; thus 
see B. J. iv. passim, 


298 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


quite another aim degenerate into banditti, how imper- 
ceptibly and yet how surely the outlaw melts into the 
brigand, the story of Dolcino’s Apostolicals, as of the Ca- 
misards in the Cevennes, abundantly teaches us ; while in 
the history of Jephthah we see how under more favour- 
able circumstances this freebooter may rise into the chief 
and champion of his people (Judg. xi. 3, 11). He would 
do this the more easily, inasmuch as he would never by his 
lawless occupation have wholly forfeited his own respect or 
the respect of his fellow-countrymen; David, indeed, him- 
self for a while was little better than such a freebooter as 
this (1 Sam. xxii. 2). Least of all would he forfeit this ata 
time when the whole framework of social life was dislo- 
cated and disjointed as it was at this period in Judea; 
and when the disorganization of society seemed half to 
justify acts which would have been wholly unjustifiable 
at another time. It is easy to perceive how a class like 
this, while it would enlist some among the worst, would 
also gather some into its ranks who, though miserably 
perverted now, might under more favourable circum- 
stances have stood forth among the noblest of their age 
and nation. It is not altogether unlikely that an apostle 
of the Lord, Simon Zelotes, had been, as his name would 
indicate, on the very verge of becoming one of these; 
until in Christ he had found a more excellent way, had 
discovered that the truth, and the truth only, could make 
him free, or help him to make others free. But these 
worst and best, however they might accidentally be yoked 
together, and called by a common name, would yet only 
be waiting for some contact with the truth, to reveal them- 
selves in the essential differences of their character, dif- 
ferences which up to that decisive moment may have been 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 299 


concealed alike from others and from themselves. So it 
fared with this malefactor and the other. The decisive 
moment had nowarrived. Heaven and hell claimed each 
its own. Of these two, so long yokefellows in evil, it was 
manifest at length that one had in him that which was 
akin to and was drawn to the light ; the other, that which 
hated the light, repelled the light, and was in return 
repelled by it into a yet deeper darkness of its own.’ 
Few as are the words which this penitent utters in his 
brief address to his fellow-sinner, and then in his still 
briefer to his Saviour, they yet are sufficient to reveal to 
us a most authentic work of grace going forward within 
him. He is, in the first place, deeply convinced of his 
sin. There is no more certain sign of an effectual work of — 
the Holy Spirit of God than a readiness on the sinner’s part 
to accept and acquiesce in his punishment, whatever that 
punishment may be, to put his mouth in the dust, and to 
say, ‘Thou art righteous, O God, that doest this;’ 
‘Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the 
punishment of his sin? (Lam. il. 19; cf. Ezra ix. 6,7; 
Luke xv. 18, 19) while, on the other hand, there can 
be no surer token of an impenitent and obdurate heart 
than the refusal of the sinner to receive correction, to 
humble himself under the mighty hand of God (Isai. i. 
ho tee iG ον On ubermey ee 1A, τῷ; Rev. ix. 21; 
xvi. 21). And this man even in that bitter cross saw 
* There are many apocryphal legends about these two robbers; which 
may be found in Thilo, Codex Apoeryphus, pp. 93, 143, 580. Their very 
names are there given, but variously, Dimas, or Dysmas, and Gestas, 
Titus and Dumachus; this last possibly a corruption of Θεομάχος. In one of 
these legends it is told how the converted robber more than thirty years 
before had allowed the blessed Virgin and her Child to pass unharmed on 
their flight to Egypt, against the desire of the other, who would have 


despoiled the fugitives. 
- 


300 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


nothing more than he had earned, ‘the due reward of his 
deeds.’ How profound the conviction, how unreserved 
upon his part is the confession, of sin! 

And then how many other principal graces show them- 
selves actively working in him'—all compressed, it is 
true, and this by the very necessities of the case, within 
the narrowest limits of time; but in their intension 
making up for what in extension they have not and can- 
not have. Ignorant he may very well have been of that 
special precept in Moses’ law, ‘Thou shalt in any case 
rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him’ (Lev. 
XIX. 17); but love is the fulfilling of the law, and love will 
not suffer him to keep silence now. They two may in 
times past have been frequent partners in guilt, associates 
in many a deed of violence and wrong, strengthening one 
another in wickedness; but now, himself a penitent, he 
would fain lead his fellow-sinner by the same blessed 
path of contrition, repentance, and faith, which he him- 
self is treading. 

And then, too, what courage, what boldness speaks out 
in his confession of Christ, in his declaration, ‘ 7 15 man 
hath done nothing amiss ; and still more in his open 
turning to Him as the one Helper and Saviour. Some 


*Thus Gregory the Great (Moral. xviii. 40): Libet mentis oculos ad 
illum latronem reducere, qui de fauce diaboli ascendit crucem, de cruce 
paradisum. Intueamur qualis ad patibulum venerit, et a patibulo qualis 
abscessit.... In corde fidelium tres summopere manere virtutes testatur 
Apostolus, dicens, Nune autem manent fides, spes, caritas. Quas cunctas 
subitaé repletus gratia et accepit latro, et servavit in cruce. Fidem namque 
habuit, qui regnaturum Dominum credidit, quem secum pariter morientem 
vidit. Spem habuit, qui regni ejus aditum postulavit, dicens, Memento mei, 
Domine, dum veneris in regnum tuum. Caritatem quoque in morte sua viva- 
citer tenuit, qui fratrem et collatronem pro simili scclere morientem, et de 
iniquitate sui arguit, et ei vitam quam cognoverat, predicavit, dicens, 
Neque tu times Deum, ete. 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 301 


perhaps might be tempted to rejoin, that at such a moment 
this did not cost him much, that for him, hanging on that 
cross, and doomed before many hours there to expire, the 
motives which would operate on others, the fear of men’s 
reproach, the desire of their applause, must all have alike 
passed away. But this is a great mistake, as will be 
evident if only we call to mind how often men, above 
all those who know no higher support, have in such a 
dreadful hour sustained themselves to the last on the 
sympathies of the beholders, when they have known 
these to be theirs ; how bold bad men, mainly upheld by 
these, have gone down with no sign of weakness, but as 
with flying colours, to hell. So far from costing him 
nothing, it must have required a mighty effort upon his 
part to separate himself, as now no doubt he did, from all 
the sympathies of all who surrounded his cross, and thus 
openly to cast in his lot with the crucified Galilean. 
Hitherto, as a victim of Roman justice, as one of the 
‘ robbers’ described just now, that is, as one of the latest 
champions of Jewish freedom, a member probably of the 
band of Barabbas, and sharing in the popular interest 
which he excited, this man had been an object of sym- 
pathy and admiration to all the scorners and blasphemers 
of Calvary. He would have become so still more, openly 
joining, as his companion did, in their insults and outrages 
against the Holy One of God. But to all this he prefers 
the reproach of Christ, which surely he did not escape, 
when he made that bold confession of his faith, ‘ Lord, 
remember me, when Thou comest into Thy kingdom. 

And if other graces manifest themselves in him, yet 
more than all other what a wondrous faith proclaims itself 
in these words of his. To believe that He, whose only 


302 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


token of royalty was the crown of thorns that still clung 
to his bleeding brows, was a king, and had a kingdom,’ 
to believe that He, on whose own eyes the mists of death 
were already hanging, was indeed the Prince of life, 
wielding in those pierced hands, nailed so helplessly to 
the cross, the keys of death and of hell, that He could 
shut and none could open, could open and none could 
shut; that it could profit something in that mysterious 
world whither they both were hastening to be remem- 
bered by this crucified man—that was a faith indeed. 
What was the faith of any other to his faith? Everything 
seemed to give the lie to Christ’s pretensions. Disciples 
and apostles themselves had fallen away and fled. They 
had trusted once, but they trusted no more, ‘ that it was 
He which should have redeemed Israel’ (Luke xxiy: 21). 
They had now renounced that hope; and, indeed, every 
other hope; and then, in the midst of this universal 
unbelief, one, all whose anterior life might seem to have 
unfitted him for this heroic act of faith, does homage, not 
indeed in outward act, for his limbs are nailed to the tree, 
but in heart and word, to Jesus as the King of Israel, as 
the Lord of the spirits of all flesh. Truly we may say of 
his faith that it was itself one of the miracles of the cruci- 
fixion;? that in his conversion we have one of those 

* Bengel: Regem profitetur, talem, qui mortuus mortuo benefacere 
DEERE often magnifies the faith which breaks forth thus unexpect- 
edly in this man, as a bright sun from behind thickest clouds. Thus (Serm. 
232): Magna fides; huic fidei quid addi possit, ignoro. Titubaverunt 
ipsi qui viderunt Christum mortuos suscitantem; credidit ille qui videbat 
secum in ligno pendentem. Quando illi titubaverunt, tune ille credidit. 
Qualem fructum Christus de arido ligno percepit?...Non solum credebat 
resurrecturum, sed etiam regnaturum. Pendenti, crucifixo, cruento, herenti, 


Cum veneris, inquit, in regnum tuum. Et illi, Nos sperabamus [Lue. xxiv. 
21]. Ubi spem latro invenit, discipulus perdidit. Compare Serm. 285. 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 303 


glimpses of glory with which the Father is ever careful to 
light up the deepest depths of the humiliation of the Son. 

But it will be well worth while to look a little closer 
and more in detail at his words. ‘Zord’ need not in 
itself be more than a general term of respectful address ; 
it is oftentimes this, and nothing further ; thus Matt. xxv. 
20, 24; John iv. 11; xi. 21; xx. 15, and elsewhere. 
But it may have a much deeper, and ἃ theological 
meaning; and such no doubt it possesses here. For 
without assuming, which would indeed be absurd, that 
this untaught man meant by his ‘Zord’ all which we 
mean by Jehovah or Lord, yet was there on his part the 
recognition of a divine character in Christ. His ‘ Zord’ 
of itself would not be sufficient to prove this, but only as 
it is read in the light of what follows, ‘Rengember me, 
when Thou comest into thy kingdom. For that ‘ Remember 
me’ is no mere counterpart of Joseph’s petition to the chief 
butler of Pharaoh (Gen. xl. 14; ef. Eeclus. xxxvii. 6), but is 
itself a prayer, even as the prayers of the Jews constantly 
clothed themselves in this same form (Nehem. xiii. 14, 22, 
31, and often in the Psalms; for another kind of remem- 
brance see Rev. xvi. 19). But seeing that it was now at 
length abundantly evident that Christ’s kingdom was not 
here, nor on this side of the grave, it must have been plainly 
in the glory of some kingdom to be revealed hereafter that 
he desired, through Christ’s remembrance of him, a part. 

The words themselves of his prayer should not stand 
exactly as in the English Version they do. Our Trans- 
Leo the Great (Serm. 51: Qu istam fidem exhortatio persuasit? que 
doctrina imbuit? quis preedicator accendit? Non viderat prius acta mira- 
cula; cessaverat tunc languentium curatio, cecorum illuminatio, vivificatio 


mortuorum; ea ipsa que mox erant gerenda non aderant; et tamen 
Dominum confitetur et Regem, quem videt supplicii sui esse consortem. 


304 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


lators have on various occasions failed to mark the 
distinction between the prepositions equivalent in the 
Greek to our ‘into’ and ‘in;”! 
thereby so grave a loss as here. It is not, ‘when Thou 


comest into thy kingdom, as though Christ’s kingdom 


seldom however incurring 


could even in thought be contemplated as apart from 
Himself; but, ‘when Thou comest in thy kingdom, —the 
words are correctly rendered at Matt. xvi. 28—‘ when 
Thou shalt appear as a king with all thy royalties around 
Thee and about thee, the angels ten thousand times 
ten thousand with Thee, and Thyself the centre of all’ 
(Dan. vii. 15; Matt. xxv. 31;'2 Thess. 1.7; Judesmay 
Christ does not and cannot come ἑπέο his kingdom ; He 
comes τη it and with it, brings his kingdom with Him, and 
where He is, there is his kingdom too.” He who could 
ask this had taken in what Pilate could not take in, that 
this man was a king, and that He would one day return 
to establish his kingdom upon earth.’ 

The reply of our Lord is a glorious example of what 


* Thus εἰς has not its proper meaning, Rom. v. 5; nor ἐν, Rom. ii. 5; v. 
21. On this, which is a fault common to many Versions of the New Testa- 
ment, see Winer, Gramm. § liv. 4, 5, 6. 

* Maldonatus forsakes his Vulgate, which, sharing the error of our Version 
and of so many other, has here, in regnum tuum; but he: ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ 
cov, in regno tuo. Itaque non est sensus, Cum veneris ad regnandum, sed, 
Oum veneris, jam regnans; cum veneris, non ad acquirendum regnum, sed 
regno jam acquisito, quemadmodum venturus ad judicium est. 

* In the Hoangelium Nicodemi (pars 2%, c, 10) the petition put into the 
mouth of this penitent, though substantially the same, is formally different. 
It is as follows: Κύριε, dre [ὁτὰν Ὁ] βασιλεύσεις, μή μου ἐπιλάθῃς. As that 
apocryphal gospel dates probably as early as the second century, it is just 
possible that the difference here may, as Tischendorf (Lvangelia Apocrypha, 
p. lxix.) suggests, represent another tradition of the words (verba latronis 
ita discedunt a Luce textu, ut ex alid veterrim4 traditione fluxisse vide- 
antur); but to me it seems far more probable that we have here no more 


than a not perfectly accurate recollection of the words as they stand in St. 
Luke. 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. γος 


we may not unfitly call the prodigalities of the kingdom 
of heaven, of the answers to prayer, infinitely larger and 
more liberal than the suppliant in the boldest ventures 
of faith had dared to suggest. In two points the grant-) 
ing of this suppliant’s petition immeasurably transcends 
the petition itself. ΑἸ] which he had been bold to ask, 
was that he might be remembered of the Lord. But one 
may remember the absent, may do them good at a dis- 
tance, and keeping them at distance still. This to have 
done would have fulfilled the measure of all which he 
had desired. But for him, the first-fruits of the cross, the 
first who should set his seal to that word of the prophecy, 
‘T, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me,’ for him 
Christ has better than remembrance in store; far better 
than this—‘ thow shalt be with Me, 

And not this only; he shall be with Him on that very 
day.’ Christ’s ‘ to-day, besides containing an announce- 
ment of his own departure out of this world within the 
limits of that day, contains also a pledge and promise for 
this poor pardoned sinner, that he too should find speedy 
release from all his agonies—a release indeed far 
speedier than according to common probabilities he 
might have looked for. Crucifixion, with all its suffer- 
ings, was so little mortal, that persons taken down from 
their cross, and duly cared for, have been known to 
recover. In the lingering torture of this punishment the 

* This is often urged by Augustine; thus Serm. 232: Quid ei dixerit 
Dominus audiamus: Amen, dico tibi, hodie mecum eris in Paradiso. Tu 
differs te; ego agnosco te; . . . invasisti in regnum celorum ; vim fecisti, 
credidisti, rapuisti. Non te differo; tants fidei hodie reddo quod debeo., 
Compare Serm. 327. 2. Instead of the rich and pregnant brevity of that 
prayer and this answer to that prayer, the Narratio Josephi (Tischendorf, 


Evangelia Apocrypha, p. 442) puts a speech of twenty lines into the mouth 
of the penitent, and one somewhat longer into that of our Lord. 


x 


406 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


seats of life were so little assailed, that it was by no means 
an uncommon case for criminals to expire at length of 
mere hunger on their cross; while, besides the breaking 
of the legs, by which the death of these two was hastened, 
various other methods were occasionally employed for ac- 
celerating, when this was thought desirable, the fatal close. , 
They were sometimes suffocated by the smoke of fires 
lighted below, or were torn in pieces by wild beasts. But 
for him within a few brief hours, before that day had 
closed, it should be well. He should be at rest, and 
more than this—in Paradise and joy. The coming of 
Christ in his kingdom might very well be a remote con- 
tingency. In all likelihood this petitioner more or less 
looked onward to it as such. But it is no remote boon 
which the Lord will bestow upon him; that very day he 
shall taste the sweetness of it: ‘To-day shalt thou be with 
Me in Paradise.” 

We must not, however, dismiss without further notice 
a word on which so much has been written, a promise 
the form of which in times past has perplexed not a few. 
As many, indeed, as assume ‘ Paradise’ to be equivalent to 
heaven, and, in fact, identical with the kingdom of glory, 
cannot fail to find a difficulty here, inasmuch as Christ 
Himself was not on that day in heaven, but in Hades; 
and these suggest various ways of escaping from this 
perplexity ; which, however, is one of their own creating. 
A not unfrequent one is the separation of ‘to-day’ from 
the words which follow, with the joining of it to those 
which precede: ‘ Verily, I say unto thee to-day, thou 

* The promise of these words can hardly fail to remind us of another 
‘Thou shalt be with me,’ Samuel’s to Saul (1 Sam. xxviii. 19); that also in 


Sheol, in the world of spirits ; but that announcement how unlike to this; as 
full of fear and terror.as this is of hope and joy. 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 307 


shalt be with Me in Paradise." Theophylact says of those 
who offer this explanation, that they ‘do violence to the 
words ;” a judgment, I think, in which most will concur.’ 
By others, who in like manner make Paradise equivalent 
to heaven, or at least fail to see its identity with Hades, 
or rather with the happier half of Hades, it is said that 
however his human soul was that day in this latter place, 
yet, according to his divine nature everywhere present, He 
was in -Paradise,—that is, as they understand it, in heaven. 

This is the usual interpretation in the early Church,* 
and in the medieval,’ and generally in the modern Roman 


‘In the Hvangelium Nicodemi, 26, the words are actually transposed, and 
stand thus, σήμερον λέγω σοι, μετ᾽ ἐμοῦ K.T.A. 

2 Εκβιάζονται τὸ ῥῆμα. 

ὅ The first I know who makes mention of this way of Bscape from an 
imaginary difficulty is Hesychius, a presbyter of.Jerusalem, who probably 
wrote in the fifth century (Quest. 47): πῶς ἡ ὑπόσχεσις τοῦ Κυρίου πρὸς τὸν 
λῃστὴν πεπλήρωται, ὅτι σήμερον μετ’ ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ: Μετὰ yap τὸν 
σταυρὸν ὁ Χριστὸς εἰς “Αἰδου ἐπὶ τῇ ἐλευθερίᾳ τῶν νεκρῶν παραγίνεται. ἔδει δὲ καὶ 
τὸν λῃστὴν (scil. παραγίνεσθαι εἰς “Αἰδου), ὑπεύθυνον ὄντα τῷ νόμῳ τῆς φύσεως. 
He goes on to state, but does not approve of, this solution: τινὲς μὲν οὕτως 
avaywackovor, ᾿Αμὴν λέγω σοι σήμερον" εἶτα ἐπιφέρουσιν, ὅτι μετ’ ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ ἐν TO 
παραδείσῳ. 

*Thns Augustine (Zp. ad Dardanum, 187); and this, although he has 
excellently well prepared the way for the right explanation by the distinction 
which he draws between Paradise, the waiting place of happy spirits, and 
heaven, or the kingdom of glory (restat igitur ut in inferno intelligatur 
esse paradisus, ubi erat illo die futurus esse secundum humanam animam 
Christus). This, however, he suggests only to abandon it again, and to 
take refuge in the omnipresence of Christ, who according to his divine nature 
was everywhere, and therefore that day in heaven. For similar explanations 
of the Greek Fathers see Suicer, Thes. s. v. λῃστής. 

* Anselm in one of his deeply pathetic Orationes (the 42nd) expresses 
himself thus: Et quid hoc est, o rex desiderabilis? Tu clavis affligeris, et 
paradisum promittis. Tu pendes in ligno, et latroni dicis, Hodie mecum 
eris in paradiso! Et, o desiderium animarum, ubi est paradisus, quia dicis 
latroni, Hodie mecum eris in paradiso? An paradisus tecum est, et ubi tu 
vis, paradisus est? An tu indubitanter paradisus es, quia tam confidenter 
promittis, Hodie mecum eris in paradiso? Credo, Domine, credo certe quod 
ubi tu vis, et ubi tu es, ibi paradisus est; et esse tecum, hoc est esse in 
paradiso. Compare Aquinas, Sum. Theol. 3%, 52. 4. 

x2 


308 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


Catholic. But it is not universal. Severus, the great 
leader of the Monophysites, has seen his way perfectly 
here ;? the only drawback to his exposition of this passage 
being that he makes Paradise here absolutely, and, so 
to speak, locally, identical with the Garden of innocence 
of our first parents; the truth being that in the evolution 
of theology in the later Jewish schools that Garden had 
lent a name to the happy place where the souls of the 
faithful, released from the burden of the flesh, are waiting 
their perfect consummation and bliss; and that it is of 
this Paradise our blessed Lord is speaking. Jeremy 
Taylor’ has traced excellently well the history of the word, 
and what upon his lips it signified now: ‘Our blessed 
Saviour told the converted thief that he should “ that day 
be with Him in Paradise.” Now without peradventure 
He spake so as He was to be understood, meaning by 
“Paradise” that which the schools and pulpits of the 
Rabbies did usually speak of it. By “ Paradise” till the 


* Corn. a Lapide: Certum enim est Christum cum latrone die illo quo 
obiit non ascendisse in cwlum, sed descendisse ad limbum patrum; ibique 
eis visionem su divinitatis impertivisse, itaque eos bedsse; quare tune 
Christus eorum sortes mutavit; fecit enim ut limbus esset paradisus, ut 
inferi essent superi, ut infernus esset celum. Ubi enim est Christus, ibi est 
paradisus; ubi est visio Dei et beatitudo, ibi est calum. 

* Valuable fragments of his Commentary on St. Luke are preserved in 
Cramer’s Catena. A few words of his on this matter I will quote: τὸ δὲ 
ἀληθὲς τῆς ἐξηγήσεως, τοῦτό ἐστι' τὰ ἐπηγγελμένα ἡμῖν ἀγαθὰ βασιλεία ἐστὶν 
οὐρανῶν, οὐχὶ ἡ εἰς τὸν παράδεισον εἴσοδος, ἢ ἡ ἐπάνοδος. ἄλλ᾽ ἴσως ἐρεῖ τις ὡς 
ταὐτόν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν καὶ ὁ παράδεισος, δύο προσηγοριῶν οὐσῶν 
περὶ ἕν πρᾶγμᾶᾷ τὸ ὑποκείμενον. ἀλλ᾽ ἡ τῶν ἱερῶν γραμμάτων διδασκαλία. δείκνυ- 
ow ὡς ov ταὐτόν ἐστιν͵ ἀλλ᾽ ἑκατέρου πολὺ τὸ διάφορον. Having vindicated the 
higher dignity of the βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν, he proceeds: ἡ δὲ ἐργασία τοῦ 
παραδείσου βαναυσός τις οὐκ ἦν, ἀλλ᾽ εἶχε λογικὴν εὐφροσύνην ἀναμεμιγμένην 
καὶ ἐννοιῶν θείων ἀπόλαυσιν. Ὥστε ὁ λῃστὴς τοῦ μὲν παραδείσου τετύ χηκεν" 
τὰ δὲ ἐν ἐλπίσι τῆς βασιλείας τῶν οὐρανῶν μετὰ τῶν ἀπ’ αἰῶνος δικαίων οὐκ ἐκο- 
μίσατο͵ τοῦ Θεοῦ περὶ ἡμῶν κρεῖττόν τι προβλεψαμένου͵ ἵνα μὴ χωρὶς ἡμῶν τελειω- 
θῶσι. 

"".Α Funeral Sermon on Sir George Dalstone. 


THE PENITENT MALEFAOCTOR. 309 


time of Esdras it is certain the Jews only meant that* 
blessed garden in which God once placed Adam and - 
Eve; but in the time of Esdras, and so downward, when 
they spake distinctly of things to happen after this life, 
and began to signify their new discoveries and modern 
philosophy by names, they called the state of souls ex- 
pecting the resurrection of their bodies by the name of 
Gan Eden, the garden of Eden. . . . It is therefore 
more than probable that when the converted thief heard 
our blessed Saviour speak of Paradise, or Gan Eden, he 
who was a Jew and heard that on that day he should be 
there, understood the meaning to be that he should be 
there where all the good Jews did believe the souls of 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be placed.’ 

This is the only occasion during the days of his flesh 
on which (so far at least as we know), Paradise was made 
mention of by our Lord. Once too He mentions it in his 
glory (Rev. 11. 7), and once it is on the lips of his chief 
* apostle (2 Cor. xii. 4). These are the only times that it 
occurs in the New Testament. Hanging on the accursed 
tree his thoughts may well have travelled back to another 
tree, even the tree of life, standing in the Paradise of. 
God : in that Paradise, which by all this travail and sore 
agony He was at this instant winning back for the chil- 
dren of men, quenching in his own blood that fiery 
flaming sword which, since the sin and sentence of Adam, 
had kept it against them; even as he was opening for 
them the gates of another Paradise, and, as a Stronger, 
wresting from the strong one the keys of death and of 
hell (Rev. i. 18). 


* Bengel: Jn paradiso: in quo feliciores arbores quam in Golgatha; cum 


immortalitate, Rev. ii. 7. 


210 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


* As I cannot but hope that materials for sermons may 
sometimes be sought in these Studves, I will not bring 
this one to a close without one or two practical observa- 
tions. There is sometimes a tendency to regard the grace 
vouchsafed to this penitent as exceptional, as not to be 
brought within the ordinary laws of God’s dealings with 
the children of men. We may sometimes hear it said, that 
as that moment when the Son of God hung upon the cross 
was a moment unlike every other in the moral and spi- 
ritual history of the world, so there were graces youch- 
safed then, unlike those of any other moment, larger, freer, 
more marvellous; such as were proper to that time and 
no other; the gates of mercy being, so to speak, thrown 
open more widely than at other times; and that therefore 
no conclusions can be drawn from what then found place 
as to what will find place when events have returned to 
their more ordinary course. This is sometimes urged, 
and chiefly out of a desire to withdraw the temptation to 
a deferred and late repentance, which the acceptance of 
this penitent at the closing moment of his life might 
else seem to hold out to others. I confess that even the 
desire to avert such an abuse, cannot persuade me to 
accept this explanation of the grace which he obtained. 
The laws of God’s kingdom, the conditions under which 
grace may be obtained, are unchangeable. This man 
was accepted and forgiven exactly on the same grounds 
as those on which any other will find pardon and accept- 
ance, because he repented, and believed, and obeyed. 
Time does not exist for God; and if only this repentance, 
faith, and obedience of his were genuine, whether they 
were spread over the forty or fifty years to which his life 
in the natural course of things might have been pro- 


THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 311 


longed, or concentrated into the few hours upon the cross 
which he actually did survive, this made and could make 
no difference in God’s sight. I have said, ‘if only these 
were genuine, which in the present instance we know 
that certainly they were; for this is the fatal danger of 
all repentance postponed to the last, and thus withdrawn 
from all trial and proof, that the man, little as he may 
guess this, may be deceiving himself; that in all likeli- 
hood his repentance is πού genuine, is not sincere; that 
almost certainly it is not so, when it has been deferred on 
so mean a speculation as this, of giving to God the least 
and obtaining from Him the most, grinding the corn of 
life, and, according to the old proverb, giving the flour to 
the devil, and only the bran to God. It is by the pressing 
of this, the almost universal self-delusion of death-bed 
repentances, that we must rescue this Scripture from dan- 
gerous abuse, from proving a temptation and a snare, not 
by excepting the dealing of God with this man from the 
category of his usual dealings in the kingdom of his 
grace and power. 


One word more. We have admired, and with abun- 
dant reason, the faith of the poor penitent, who could 
believe, even in such an hour as that was, in the royalties 
of Christ, that the title set in bitter mockery over his 
head, spake nothing more than the truth, that He was a 
king, and would yet come in his kingdom, and that it 
would be well with them who should be then remembered 
of Him. But let us not finally take leave of this history 
without reverently admiring also hs faith to whom this 
prayer was addressed, his confidence, not to be shaken by 
all which was happening round Him, which was finding 


212 THE PENITENT MALEFACTOR. 


place within Him, in his divine Sonship; his, who could 
believe that, crucified through weakness, He was yet 
Lord over all, that all things had been delivered into his 
hands by his Father, that He could grant to this suppliant 
for his favour all which he asked, and much more than 
he asked; who dispensed as confidently his favours from 
that cross of shame as the kings of the earth dispense 
theirs from their thrones of glory; who in this promise 
claimed and avouched all worlds as his own. Not when 
the victory had been already won, and He had been 
declared to be the Son of God with power by the Resur- 
rection from the dead (Rom. i. 4), did He say to the 
beloved apostle, ‘I am He that liveth and was dead ; 
and behold I am alive for evermore ; and have the keys 
of death and of hell’ (Rev. i. 18), with a calmer and 
more majestic confidence than to this poor suppliant man 
He declares in the hour of his own agony, ‘ 7o-day shalt 
thou be with Me in Paradise. Truly this is the Lord of 
life;' and then, when He thus spake, was gloriously 
fulfilled that which so many of the early Fathers thought 
they found written as a prophecy of the triumphs of the 
cross in the g6th Psalm, and which is equally true 
whether there fore-announced or not, Regnavit a ligno 
Deus. 


16. CHRIST AND THE TWO DISCIPLES 
ON THE WAY TO EMMAUS. 


Mark xvi. 12,13; Luke xxiv. 13—35. 


We have a slight hint of this beautiful little history, and 
indeed the history itself, but in barest outline, at Mark 
xvi. 12. He has there very much such a summary 
abridgement of it as he has of the Temptation elsewhere 
(i. 12,13). At the same time, for the breadth and ful- 
ness of detail, which render it one of the most interesting 
records of the Great Forty Days, we are altogether in- 
debted to St. Luke. 

The Resurrection had taken place already; but the 
disciples had refused to credit it. The Sun of Righteous- 
ness, which seemed to have set forever, had again risen 
with healing on his wings; but the disciples, not without 
grave fault of their own, are walking on in darkness still, 
in a darkness which in some sort they have made for 
themselves. Soit fares with these two, of whom we here 
read: ‘And behold, two of them went that same day to a 
village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about 
threescore furlongs. The name of one of these favoured 
wayfarers we learn a little further on. It was Cleopas 
(ver. 18), who must not be identified with the Cleopas of 
John xix. 25." Who the other might be we are not told. 


1 This Κλεόπ ¢ is short for KAedrarpoc, while that (KAw7ac) is an Aramaic 
name. 


314 CHRIST AND THE TWO DISCIPLES 


Apostle he certainly was not; and those who suggest 
Bartholomew or James cannot reconcile this with the 
fact that the two report the mysterious interview to the 
Eleven (ver. 23), could not therefore themselves belong to 
the Eleven. Neither is it at all likely that the unnamed 
disciple was St. Luke himself; for this. again, seems 
scarcely reconcilable with the announcement of the Evan- 
gelist that the account which he gives in his Gospel was 
delivered to him by those who were ‘eyewitnesses,’ as 
well as ‘ministers of the word’ (1. 2); herein implicitly 
affirming that such ‘eyewitness’ he had not himself been, 
that he had not himself beheld, as these two beheld, the 
risen Lord. Jerome and others suppose that they may 
both have been of the Seventy; which is probable enough ; 
but we cannot affirm it with any certainty. The village 
of Emmaus, north of Jerusalem, and mentioned by Jose- 
phus,' to which they were journeying, ought not to be 
confounded, as it has often been, with another Emmaus 
in the plain of Judzea, and not ‘threescore furlongs, or 
something more than seven miles, from Jerusalem, but 
not less than twenty from the capital city. All modern 
attempts to discover the site of this village have: been 
unsuccessful. 

‘And they talked together of all these things which had 
happened. And it came to pass that, while they communed 
together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near, and went 
with them. But their eyes were holden, that they should 
not know Him’ (cf. John xx. 14; xxi. 4). While St. 
Mark seems to lay the cause of the non-recognition of the 
Lord on the part of his disciples to his changed ap- 
pearance (‘ after that He appeared in another form unto two 


2B. ὧς Will, δὲ δὲ 


ON THE WAY TO EMMAUS. 315 


of them’), St. Luke finds it rather in their ‘holden eyes.” 
‘And He said unto them, What manner of communications 
are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and 
are sad?” From more than one word here, we may 
take it for granted that the two disciples were in earnest 
debate; not unduly striving nor contending; but still re- 
garding from different points of view, and each urging 
upon the other his own interpretation of, that stupendous 
event, of which they had just been the witnesses. To 
them thus earnestly debating, and allowing this earnest- 
ness to shew itself in their outward mien, the Lord joined 
Himself, in guise the most unpretending, as a fellow- 
traveller on the same road with themselves ; but at the 
same time as one hithself interested in the matter which 
could interest them so strongly, and moved no less by the 
settled sadness of their countenances ; and who, out of no 
idle curiosity, would fain learn, if this might be permitted, 
what it was that stirred and saddened them so much. 

The two disciples, as I think we may gather from their 
reply, were not perfectly pleased to be atcosted, and in- 
terrupted in their confidential discourse with one another, 
by one who seemed to have no right to meddle with the 
sacredness of their sorrow. They cannot forbear ex- 

* The two statements are excellently reconciled by St. Augustine (Serm. 
239. 2): Alia enim effigies visa est, retentis oculis non apertis. 

** And are sad’ is hardly an adequate rendering of καί ἐστε σκυθρωποί, 
though it might be difficult to improve it. Σκυθρωπός, occurring in the, 
New Testament only here and at Matt. vi. 16 (where Basil the Great ex- 
changes it well with στυγνάζων), and in the Old at Gen. xl. 7: Dan. i. 10; 
Sirac. xxv. 23, from σκυθρός (and that from oxifouar) and oy, is better ex- 
pressed by the German ‘traurig,’ as it would be by our own ‘dreary,’ if 
‘dreary’ still kept the exact force which it had at the beginning; see for 
this in Richardson’s Hnglish Dictionary the quotation from Gower ; 
another in Richard of Hampole’s Pricke of Conscience: 

‘ Now es a man light, now es he hevy, 


Now es he blithe, now es he drery.’ 
It expresses the downcast look of a settled grief, pain, or displeasure. 


416 CHRIST AND THE TWO DISCIPLES 


pressing their surprise that such a question should have 
been put to them: ‘ And the one of them, whose name 
was Cleopas, answering said unto Him, Art thou only a 
stranger at Jerusalem, and hast not known the things 
which are come to pass there in these days? The English 
Version is not here perfectly satisfactory. It seems to 
attribute the questioner’s ignorance of what must be the 
cause of their grief to his being ‘a stranger’ or sojourner 
at Jerusalem. But, not to say that such an event as the 
rejection and crucifixion of one who claimed to be the 
Messiah must have been just as well known to the 
pilgrims at the feast as to the actual dwellers at Jerusalem, 
the words will not bear this meaning. They are not 
without a certain difficulty; but on the whole it will be 
best and simplest to render the first clause in the sentence 
thus, ‘Dost thou lodge alone at Jerusalem? ‘ Dwellest 
thou,’ that is, ‘in solitude there, apart from the busy con- 
course of men, and thus so withdrawn from acquaintance 
with all which is passing in the city, that no tidings have 
reached thee of the mighty and marvellous events which 
within the last few days have befallen?’ The disciples, 
in the all-absorbing interest which those events have for 
them, take for granted that, if only known, they must 
have the same for every other; and they have, more- 
over, been so blown abroad, that nothing but an absolute 
isolation from all company with his fellow-men can have 
hindered their questioner from having knowledge of them.’ 


1 Beza: Tu solus commoraris Hierosolymis? with a shifting of the 
emphasis from παροικεῖς to μόνος. All which could be urged against this 
rendering is that παροικεῖς thus fails to obtain its full force, and is too much 
rendered as though it were κατοικεῖς : but the other explanations, such as 
are offered by Theophylact, Castalio (quoted by Beza), Meyer, and others, 
seem to me either absolutely untenable, or encumbered with far more 
serious difficulties than is this. 


ON THE WAY TO EMMAUS. — 317 


The Lord’s answer, ‘What things ? is exactly adapted 
to draw from the disciples a further communication. 
Had He replied that He knew, this would naturally have 
prevented Cleopas from entering further into a matter 
already familiar to his interrogator; and, of course, He 
could not answer that He did not know. His question 
serves the purpose for which it was intended: ‘And they 
said unto Him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was 
a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all 
the people’ (cf. Acts vil. 22). From this answer of theirs 
it is evident that the mystery of Christ’s divine nature 
was hidden from them as yet; or if at any time they had 
caught glimpses of it, these now were completely obscured 
by the thick shadows which during the last days had 
closed around their Lord. Jesus was to them ‘ a prophet,’ 
and, as we presently see, the prophet, He that ‘ should have 
redeemed Israel, the Messiah therefore ; but the Jewish 
anticipations of a Messiah (and they had not lifted them- 
selves above these), did not involve more than glorious 
human prerogatives. That Messiah should come, and 
that God should come, they expected both; but that both 
promises should be fulfilled in one and the same person, 
that these two stars of hope, which had lighted Israel 
through long ages of gloom, should in the actual fulfil- 
ment blend and become one star, this was a mystery hidden, 
we may say, or almost hidden, from prophets and kings, 
from those who most waited for the consolation of Israel. 

They go onto complain of the reception which, notwith- 
standing all these glorious manifestations of his power both 
in word and work, He had found from the spiritual chiefs 
of the people : ‘ and how the Chief Priests and our rulers 
delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified 


318 CHRIST AND THE TWO DISCIPLES 


Him. But we trusted’ (they speak of it as a trust which 
they must now renounce, which indeed they have re- 
nounced), ‘that ithad been He which should have redeemed 
Israel.’ To say, as some do, that this redemption which 
they looked for at the hands of the Messiah was merely a 
deliverance from the yoke of their worldly oppressors, is 
certainly a mistake. It may have been thus with many ; 
but there were always those who understood that the 
deliverance must reach much deeper than this; that to 
be a redemption worth the name, it must be a redemption 
from sin, from the bondage of unruly appetites and in- 
ordinate desires. It was indeed true that this deliverance 
would necessarily, in God’s good providence, have drawn 
after it that other deliverance; that if Israel had turned 
to God, and welcomed his Anointed, the yoke of its 
Roman lords would, in one way or another, have soon 
been broken from its neck; for this bondage was but an 
echo of the other; and thus the faithful in Israel may 
very possibly have blended, in all likelihood did blend, 
the two deliverances into one; but still this outward re- 
demption was not in their thoughts the beginning, 
still less was it the whole, of the redemption. In the 
prophecy of the father of the Baptist the two redemptions, 
from the yoke of evil and from the yoke of their foreign 
oppressors, are wonderfully blended together. He whom 
God shall raise up, a horn of salvation for his people, shall 
deliver them from their enemies ; but this, that they may 


* Augustine (Serm. 235. ὃ 2): Quando enim cum illis fuerat ante 
passionem, omnia preedixerat, passurum se fuisse, moriturum, tertio die re- 
surrecturum; omnia pradixerat; sed mors illius, illorum oblivio fuit. Sic 
perturbati sunt, quando eum viderunt in ligno pendentem, ut obliviscerentur 
docentem, non exspectarent resurgentem, nec tenerent promittentem. Nos, 
inquiunt, sperabamus quia ipse erat redemturus Israél. OQ discipuli, 
sperabatis? ergo jam non speratis. 


a 


ON THE WAY TO EMMAUS. 319 


serve Him in righteousness and true holiness all the days 
of their life (Luke i. 68-79; cf. John viii. 31-36). 

They go on: ‘ And besides all this, in addition to that 
cruel death inflicted on Him by our rulers, and sufficiently 
explaining the sadness which Thou hast noted in us, ¢ fo- 
day is the third day since these things were done. We 
might have had some glimpses of hope up to this present — 
time, seeing that while He was alive, He more than once 
uttered mysterious words not merely about his own death, 
words which we have found only too true, but also about 
a triumphant reversal of that doom of death, mysterious 
words about what should happen on the third day after 
his death; but this day has arrived, and is unmarked by 
any change.’ How much unbelief is there here. The 
third day has come, but it has not gone; and how could 
they be sure that He had not already made good his 
words? indeed, there was much to render it likely that 
He had. Their own words which follow imply as much: 
‘Yea, and certain women of our company made us aston- 
ished, which were early at the sepulchre. And when they 
found not his body, they came, saying, that they had also 
seen a vision of angels, which said that He was alive’ 
(ver. 1-10; John xx. 1, 2). The hesitating, doubting 
disciples will not confidently affirm of this that it was a 
mere subjective imagination of these women; as little 
pledge themselves to its objective reality. They speak of 
it therefore as ‘a vision of angels, leaving this matter un- 
decided. They go on to tell of the visit of Peter and 
John to the sepulchre; ‘and certain of them which were 
with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the 
women had said.’ But, having thus stated all which gave 
them warrant for hope, they yet leave off with the 


320 CHRIST AND THE TWO DISCIPLES 


mournful, desponding words—‘ but Him they saw not’ (cf. 
ver. 12; John xx. 3-10). 

They have poured out all their hearts before Him. It 
is now his turn to speak. He still, indeed, preserves his 
incognito; their eyes are holden as at the first, so that 
they still see in Him no more than the sympathizing 
stranger, who has joined himself to them in the way. 
Much, no doubt, they must have wondered when they 
found in Him a scribe instructed to the kingdom; one 
who took the part of their former hopes against their 
present fears; one whose very rebukes, earnest as they 
were, must have been welcome; for it was their despair 
which He rebuked; and just so far as they acknowledged 
those rebukes to be just, their despair must have given 
place to hope, their sorrow have been turned into joy. 
‘And He said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to 
believe all that the prophets have spoken. Some of the 
Scripture they had believed, as much as fell in with their 
preconceived notions, prejudices, and opinions; which is 
so often the way with us all; but not ‘ all that the prophets 
had spoken. Man’s word, and woman’s word, and angels’ 
words, they had paid more or less heed to all these; but 
God’s word, that word which liveth and abideth for ever, 
they had not built and established themselves on it. Of 
that word they had not enquired, nor sought to learn 
from it how it should fare with the Christ of God; else 
they would have found that the very things over which 
they were mourning, as the defeat and discomfiture of all 
their high-raised expectations, had long ago, even from 
the beginning, been fore-announced and declared needful 
preliminaries to his entrance into his glory. They 
would there have learned that these sufferings and this 


ON THE WAY TO EMMAUS. 321 


death, so far from giving the lie to their Lord’s pretensions 
as the Christ, were actually laid down in Scripture as 
things without the endurance of which the true signs 
of the Messiah would have been wanting in Him; that 
through the vestibule of death it was appointed for Him 
to pass into the palace of life: ‘ Ought not Christ to have 
suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? They 
hitherto had not spoken of Christ but in a roundabout 
manner, as ‘ He that should have redeemed Israel’ (ver. 
21); but the Lord at once employs this word which 
stood at the centre of all Jewish hopes. They err who 
conclude from hence that Christ had entered into his 
glory already; He did not do this till his Ascension, and 
this which He is speaking now is not history, but doctrine. 
Did not the Scripture announce a suffering Messiah before 
a reigning and glorious One? 

‘And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He ex- 
pounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concern- 
ing Himself’ (cf. ver. 44; John i. 45; Acts xxvi. 22, 2: 
1 Pet.i.11). What, we may reverently enquire, were the 
passages to which the great Prophet of the New Covenant 
mainly referred, as having in Himself been fulfilled? And 
first, what prophecies of a suffermg Messiah did He recog- 
nize and allow, claim in the books of Moses for his own? 
He began, as we can hardly doubt, with the prot- 
evangelium ; the Seed of the woman, who should bruise 
the serpent’s head, or, in other words, inflict on him a 
wound which should be deadly, was not Himself to escape 
unscathed altogether; this same serpent should bruise 
his heel (Gen. iii. 15). And then there were the types, 
claimed by the Lord in the days of his flesh, or by those 
who wrote concerning Him, as fulfilled in Him; the 

¥ 


1122 CHRIST AND THE TWO DISCIPLES 


brazen serpent (Num. xxi. g; John iii. 14); the paschal | 


Lamb (Exod. xii. 46; John xix. 36); and as the types, 
so also the typical persons; Joseph, who from the lowest 
humiliation of the pit and the dungeon passed to the highest 
place of dignity and honour, even to the right hand of 
the throng; David, who suffered so much and so long 
from the persecutions of Saul—these, with many more. 
And when the august Interpreter of the things in Scripture 
concerning Himself reached the prophets, it can be little 


doubtful that the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah was the 


central prophecy which He expounded. Around this 
there would be grouped the great prophetical Psalms of 
the Crucifixion—the Psalms are specially referred to, not 
here, but ver. 44—as eminently the twenty-sacond, claimed 
by the Lord upon his cross (Matt. xxvii. 46; Mark xv. 
24), and the fortieth, claimed in like manner for Him by 
his apostle (Heb. x. 5) ; then further Daniel ix. 26; and 
the book of the prophet Jonah; while Zechariah would 
prove rich in prophetic glimpses of all which had just on 
Calvary been fulfilled, as xii. 10; xiii. 7. These disciples 
had assumed that Jesus of Nazareth could not be the 
Christ, because He had suffered these things; the Lord 
shews them from all Scripture that He could not be the 
Christ, wa/ess He had suffered these things. 

And now, while He was still engaged in opening to 
them the Scriptures, ‘they drew nigh unto the village, 
whither they went ; and He made as though He would have 
gone further ; not, that is, pretended, but actually would 
have gone further, unless they had detained Him; by 
thus offering to proceed, proving them, whether his words 
had taken any mighty hold upon them or not; and 
whether there was any desire upon their part for further 


— » 


ΟΝ THE WAY TO EMMAUS. 323 


communion with Him (cf. Mark vi. 48). It was seen 
that there was so. Much they had heard, yet they evi- 
dently desired to hear still more. ‘ But they constrained 
Him, saying, Abide with us, for it is toward evening, and 
the day is far spent. And He went in to tarry with them’ 
—to be their guest now, as two of their number at the 
outset of his ministry had been his (John i. 39). 

‘And it came to pass, as He sat at meat with them, He 
took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. 
He, in some sort the guest, assumes at once the place of 
the host, and, as at other times (Matt. xiv. 19; xv. 36; 
XXvi. 26), the prerogatives of the householder or goodman 
of the house, to whom this blessing and giving of thanks. 
of right belonged. ‘And their eyes. were opened, and 
they knew Him ; and He vanished out of their sight. He 
was known to them, as they themselves report to the 
Eleven, ‘in breaking of bread’ (ver. 35). This might 
seem to imply that there was something in the act of 
breaking of bread by which they recognized at last with 
whom they had to do. At the same time the words, 
‘their eyes were opened, going before ‘they knew Him,’ 
and put evidently as the condition of their knowing, 
imply that it was not a mere natural conclusion which 
they drew from something which they. saw Him do, but 
a supernatural enlightenment, a ceasing of the condition 
indicated at ver. 16, where it is said, ‘ther eyes were 
holden.’ But what was there, it may be asked, in this 
‘breaking of bread’ by which they knew Him? Some 
answer that this was a celebration of the Holy Eucharist," 
and that they recognized the form of consecrating words. 

* Thus Augustine (Serm. 239): In panis fractione cognoscitur, quia ibi 
percipitur, ubi vita eterna percipitur. 


Υ2 


224 CHRIST AND THE TWO DISCIPLES 


But, in the first place, certainly these two were not pre- 
sent at the institution of the Holy Eucharist, for only 
apostles, which these are not, were there. And then, in 
the second place, it is an entirely gratuitous assumption 
that this was an Eucharistic celebration. Roman Catholics 
are fond of asserting that it was so, thus to find warrant 
and authority for reception under one kind, only bread 
being mentioned here. The blessing of the bread can of 
itself prove nothing. It is quite true that this is mentioned, 
and that it constituted an essential part of the Eucharistic 
celebration (Mark xiv. 22); but as at other times also He 
blessed the bread (Mark vi. 41), no argument can be 
drawn from hence; and for us the absence of one of the 
constituent elements of this sacrament may well be de- 
cisive that no such sacrament was here. The words can 
scarcely mean more than that at that solemn moment 
their Lord revealed to them who He was. The manner 
of his disappearance, like that of all his comings and 
goings after the Resurrection, is mysterious (John xx. 
19, 26), and quite unlike anything which had found place 
before. His body, it is evident, was not any longer sub- 
mitted to the same laws as those to which ours are 
submitted now, and to which his own had been hitherto 
submitted. 

‘And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn 
within us, while He talked with us by the way, and while 
He opened to us the Scriptures 2? They wonder that this 
had not enabled them long since to guess who it was that 
had thus been speaking with them. The nearest parallel 
to this of the heart burning within them may be found in 
the words of the Psalmist, ‘ While I was musing, the fire 
- burned; then spake I with my tongue’ (Ps. xxxix. 3). 


ΨΥ 


ON THE WAY ΤῸ EMMAUS. 325 


With such tidings to tell, they do not tarry any longer at 
Emmaus. ‘ They rose up the same hour, and returned to 
Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them 
that were with them. Yet if they imagined that they were 
the first to bring the glad tidings, in this they were dis- 
appointed—if disappointment it could be called ; they did 
but contribute another stream to swell the great floodtide 
of joy, which every moment was rising higher and higher. 
They found the Eleven, and them that were with them, 
able to answer good tidings with good; nay, as it would 
seem, preventing their good tidings with those which they 
had themselves to tell, with evidence coming in from one 
quarter and another, and now from the very chief among 
themselves, that the barriers of the grave had indeed been 
broken, that their Lord was in truth that Conqueror of 
death, that Prince of life, which in their unbelieving ears 
He had proclaimed Himself to be: ‘ The Lord is risen 
indeed, and hath appeared to Simon’ (ef. 1 Cor. xv. 5). 
And yet, anticipated though their tidings had been, every 
confirmation of a fact so marvellous, so far transcending 
all experience and all hope, must have been welcome ; 
welcome therefore their confirmation of it, as they threw 
their symbol into the common stock of hope ripening 
now into glorious certainty, as ‘they told what things were 
done in the way, and how He was known of them in 
breaking of bread.’ 


* This Scripture, besides its literal and historic meaning, may possibly 
have a symbolic meaning as well. Such Hugh of St. Victor has traced in it 
(Miscel. i. 100): Jesus in vid ambulantibus faciem suam abscondit, osten- 
surus eam in patrid. Propterea in fine view cum discumbere ceepissent, fregit 
Jesus panem ut interiora ejus patescerent, et ibi eum agnoverunt, quia post 
vites hujus cursum in regno cw#lorum cum Abraham et Isaac et Jacob dis- 
cumbentes, et super mensam ejus edentes et bibentes in eterno convivio, Jesu 


16 CHRIST AND THE TWO DISCIPLES, ETC. 


claritatem videbunt. Nunc autem interim in vid peregrinus apparet, ut 
exilium nostrum agnoscamus, et quod alia est patria nostra. Et colloquendo 
corda ad amorem inflammat, sed oculos ad contemplationem adhuec non 
revelat. Qui ergo in vid ex sermonibus Jesu ignem amoris corde concipiunt, 
in fine vie claritatem ejus videbunt. Sunt itaque lingue ignes que 
veniunt ad nos; et verba flammantia quotidie Christum nobis loquentem 
audimus; quia spiritum Christi non habet, qui verba Christi audiendo non 
ardet. I will fill this page with one quotation more from the same illus- 
trious theologian, its right to a place here consisting in the commentary 
which it supplies to those words of the disciples, ‘Did not our heart burn 
within us?’ though indeed I am more tempted to quote it as a magni- 
ficent specimen of what mediwval Latin in the hands of a great master, who 
had some great truth to set forth, could accomplish (Jn Hecles. Hom. 1): 
In meditatione quasi quedam lucta est ignorantiz cum scientid, et lumen 
veritatis quodammodo in media caligine erroris emicat; velut ignis in ligno 
viridi, primo quidem difficile apprehendit, sed cum flatu vehementer excitatus 
fuerit, et acrius in subjectam materiam exardescere cceperit, tune magnos 
quosdam fumose caliginis globos exurgere, et ipsam adhuc modice scintil- 
lationis flammam rarius interlucentem obvolvere videmus: donec tandem, 
paulatim crescente incendio, vapore omni exhausto et caligine disjecta, 
splendor serenus appareat. Tune victrix flamma in omnem crepitantis rogi 
congeriem discurrens, libere dominatur; subjectamque materiam circum- 
volitans, ac molli attactu perstringens lambendo exurit ac penetrat : nec prius 
quiescit, quam interna penetrando succedens totum quodammodo traxerit in 
se, quod invenit preter se. Postquam autem incendio id quod exurendum 
est concrematum a sni quodammodo naturé totum in ignis similitudinem 
proprietatemque transierit, tunc omnis fragor decidit et strepitus sopitur, 
atque illa flammarum spicula 6 medio sublata tolluntur, seevusque ille et vorax 
ignis, cunctis sibi subjectis et amici quédam similitudine concorporatis, 
in alti se pace silentioque componit ; quia jam non invenit nec diversum 
aliquid preter se, nec adversum contra se. . . . Sic nimirum carnale cor, quasi 
lignum viride, et necdum ab humore carnalis concupiscentia exsiccatum, si 
quando aliquam divini timoris seu dilectionis scintillam conceperit, primum 
quidem pravis desideriis reluctantibus passionum et perturbationum fumus 
exoritur ; deinde, roboraté mente, cum flamma amoris et validius ardere et 
clarius splendere cceperit, mox omnis perturbationum caligo evanescit ; et 
jam pura mente animus ad contemplationem veritatis se diffundit. Novissime 
autem, postquam assidua veritatis contemplatione cor penetratum fuerit, et 
ad ipsum summ veritatis fontem medullitus toto anime affectu intraverit, 
tunc in idipsum dulcedinis quasi totum ignitum, et in ignem amoris con- 
versum, ab omni strepitu et perturbatione pacatissimum requiescit. 


> 


ΠῚ 


. ve 
wun ἢ am 
At a Wx 


a i" 


ΤᾺ ΠΝ ᾿ sa) 


a tie oe " 
ἐν MOS 

ἐν a oe 
ἐν 


ὃ ἘΠ 


Ι! Td 


